What is the difference between percentile and percentage

Rank : Percentiles are based on ranked numbers while percentages are not. Ratio : Percentages can be written as a ratio, while percentiles cannot be written as a ratio. Based on: A percent is based on one case, while percentile is based on a comparison of one case with all the cases in a particular situation.

Distribution : Percentiles rely on a normal distribution, while percentages do not. Percentile is a value that is based on a comparison with other values along a normal distribution curve and is indicated as xth. Author Recent Posts. Her skills lie in research and writing for a range of educational levels and teaching various Biology classes. She has been trained as a lecturer, researcher and computer scientist. She has experience as a writer, researcher and as a college teacher, and is currently working as a freelance writer and editor.

Her accomplishments include receiving tenure and being promoted to Associate Professor of Biology in the United States and publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals. Her hometown is Pietermaritzburg in South Africa where her main interest and hobby is bird watching. Latest posts by Dr. Rae Osborn see all. Help us improve. Rate this post! Cancel Reply. For comparison purposes, a percentage is a simple method of standardizing different quantities.

Therefore, we can say that the concept of percentage has many real applications in the different situations of our everyday lives. Suppose that a bag contains 2 kg of apples and 3 kg of mangoes. We have to find the percentage occupied by each fruit. Percentages are widely used in several other fields like in the financial world for calculating the interest rates, in academics for calculating students' grades at school or college, etc.

We not only represent data in percentage but also indicate the increase and decrease of value in percentage. Solved Examples On Percentage:. Question 1. Ram has a monthly salary of Rs 30, He spends 10, on his expenses. Like the depiction of a percentile would be something like n th. To give an example, we can easily derive a percentage of marks we got but we cannot weigh that marks received.

But at the same time; all the marks received in the class by all students can be weighed on the percentile ranking. The percentage does not deal with Quartiles. Quartiles are similar to what implies when we say a quarter. For example, 25 th Percentile is called the first quartile, the 50 th is called the second quartile, 75 th is the third quartile and th is the fourth quartile.

Percentile takes the aggregate of an entire group of people. Hence, the position of percentage is always out of The position of the percentile is found on or below the score received vis a vis a well-distributed group.

A percentile separates an entire population into subsets wherein the meaning of numbers can be applied to a population. While percentages give you an indication of how well an individual person performed on a test, percentiles give you an indication of how well that person did compared to others.

The distribution of scores ends up looking something like this:. The height of each bar represents the number of people who received that particular score. So, more people received a score of 34 than a score of This is her percentile rank. Her 60 th percentile rank is an expression of how the candidate did relative to everyone who took the test, not her individual score.

In other words, a percentile rank is a way of rank ordering people compared to others in a sample.