Karnataka Reservation Categories for CET Admissions

Open any official KEA cut-off list and the ranks are split across eight columns of codes — GM, 1G, 2AG, 2BG, 3AG, 3BG, SCG and STG. They are not difficulty levels or streams. Each is a separate pool of seats with its own closing rank, and only one column applies to you.

Reading the wrong column is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes in Karnataka counselling, because it happens silently. A branch that looks impossible in General Merit may have closed tens of thousands of ranks later in the column that actually applies to you, and a candidate who never checks simply removes the college from their list.

What the codes stand for

Categories 1, 2A, 2B, 3A and 3B are Karnataka's own backward classes categories, which is why they appear on a KCET list and not on a national one. SC and ST follow the central classification.

COMEDK, which runs its own counselling for private engineering seats, uses a different and much smaller scheme: General Merit and KKR (Kalyana-Karnataka Region) only.

General Merit is not "everyone else"

The most persistent misunderstanding is that GM is the default column. It is not. General Merit is a minority of KCET seats, and every reserved category has its own closing rank for the same branch at the same college.

We hold thousands of verified closing ranks in the reserved categories — over 1,300 for Category 2A alone, and around 700 each for SC and ST. Until recently there was nowhere on this site to browse them, which is a fair description of the market generally: category-wise closing ranks exist in the official documents and almost nobody publishes them in a form you can actually use.

They are now on the site, one page per category, at our category cut-off pages.

Your category rank is a different number from your overall rank

KEA publishes both, and they are not interchangeable. The cut-off columns are category closing ranks, so you compare them against your category rank — not the larger number printed on your result.

Getting this backwards produces a confident and completely wrong answer, and it will do so in any predictor including ours. If your two ranks differ substantially, check which one you are typing before you trust the output.

Eligibility and reservation percentages

Which category you belong to, what documents prove it, and what share of seats each category receives are set by government order. Those rules have changed in recent years.

We do not restate them here. A figure we cannot cite is worth less than no figure at all, and this is the one topic where being wrong costs a student a seat rather than an argument. Read them from the Karnataka Examinations Authority directly.

What we can tell you is what the official cut-off documents contain, because we have transcribed them: which categories KEA publishes, how many closing ranks exist in each, and exactly what each one closed at, college by college and branch by branch.

Practical steps

Settle your category before document verification, not during it. The certificate is what the verification stage checks, and a category you cannot evidence is a category you do not have for counselling purposes.

Filter every shortlist by your own column. Our category pages list branch-by-branch closing ranks for each category, and each links through to the colleges behind it.

Use your category rank in the predictor. The college predictor asks for a category for exactly this reason — it filters to the rows that apply to you rather than showing you somebody else's competition.

Every rank on this site is transcribed from the official KEA and COMEDK publications, never from another portal. Our methodology page sets out how, and why that distinction matters.