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Basic Question 12 of 18

Suppose you took a college entrance exam and scored in the 90th percentile. Explain what this means.

A. You scored better than 90% of the people who took this exam.
B. Ninety percent of the people who took this exam scored better than you.
C. You answered 90% of the questions correctly.

User Contributed Comments 8

User Comment
sunilcfa Why not C??
Khadria C is not true because the exam questions can be unequally weigted. Assume there are only 2 questions. One carry 90 marks and other carry 10 marks. If you get only first one correct, you answered 50% of the questions correct but got 90% of the marks.
studyprep Here in this percentile question, you do not need to know how many questions did you solve the correctly. Percentile means, among all other students, you were among top 10% of the population. Consider this example: Suppose 90% students got 40 marks out of 100 and 10% students got 42 marks out of 100. so those students who got 42 marks are in 90th percentile.
wulin In order for you to pass the CFA lv1, you will probably need to score in the 60th percentile.
thekid Splitting hair perhaps...
Shouldn't it be "you scored better than 89% of the people"?
B/C you scored in the 90th percentile therefore 89% should be below you and 10% above you and 1% same as you...? Please correct me otherwise.
alester83 percentage and percentile is different. think of percentile as a peer rank or relative rank. 50% of people who took the exam for example could have gotten 90% of the questions right. does that help?
tichas you might answer 90% of the questions and still not in 90 percentile . 90 percentile means you have done better than 90% of the candidates who took the test.You might answer 60% of the questions right and be in 90 percentile.
RoL9833Y How about to think getting 90 Mark's out of total Mark's of 100.
Then, 90% will be the 90th percentile?
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Edward Liu

Learning Outcome Statements

calculate, interpret, and evaluate measures of central tendency and location to address an investment problem

CFA® 2024 Level I Curriculum, Volume 1, Module 3.