Round 1, Round 2 and mop-up: how MBBS cutoffs shift across counselling rounds

Candidates often ask which cutoff to look at: the one from the first round, or a later one? The honest answer is that they measure different things, and choosing the wrong one can make a college look harder or easier than it really is.

A real example

In the 2025-26 lists, the open general seats at Osmania Medical College closed at roughly state merit rank 256 in the first round. In the second round the closing rank at the same college was roughly 388. Same college, same seat type, but the cutoff moved by about 50%.

(These figures leave out a handful of disability-quota admissions, which sit in a separate pool and would otherwise make the closing rank look absurdly high. More on that in our guide to special quotas.)

Why later rounds reach further down the list

• Seats get vacated. Candidates who were allotted a seat in round 1 may take a better option in round 2, or not join at all. Those seats go back into the pool.
• Choices change. After round 1, candidates know where they stand and revise their preferences, which reshuffles who ends up where.
• Mop-up rounds fill what is left. By this stage the remaining seats are the ones nobody above a given rank wanted or could take, so closing ranks can be far larger.

How to use this

• If you want to know whether a college is reachable at all, look at the later-round closing rank, since that is the furthest it ever reached.
• If you want to know whether you will get it early, look at the round 1 figure. That is the stricter test.
• Do not assume a later round will always be kinder. Top colleges tend to fill in round 1, and a rank that missed the round 1 cutoff by a wide margin is unlikely to be rescued later.

Small categories swing more

Everything above is noisier when a college has very few seats in your category. In the AY 2026-27 seat matrix, several categories at newer government colleges have only one or two seats. With so few admissions, one candidate accepting or declining can move the cutoff by hundreds of ranks. For these, treat the closing rank as a rough hint.

The predictor lets you pick Round 1, Round 2 or either, so you can see both views.