Board Thread:Theories and Speculation/@comment-25132842-20180415030219/@comment-734582-20180415151658

We don't have enough context to really know the answer.

We don't know what a normal Chunin exams looks like, but we do know that in 3 years time, there would be 3*2 = 6 exams. yet, 10 Ninja became chunin (K12 sans Naruto and Sasuke). So we can definitely say that Shikamaru being the only Chunin promotion is a below-average result.

Doing a rough headcount at the first question, about 200 ninja (~10 rows of ~20, or ~60 teams) were present. 78 succeeded (26 teams) or about half of the teams. The Forest was supposed to halve the number of teams again. Anko expected single digits after the Forest. This means around 20 are promoted to chunin per year at most. Given that they're supposed to lead teams of 3, around 60 new genin can be supported. Spread over 3 or 4 nations. Given the K12 results, those 20 new Chunin lead to 2 new Jonin. Given that Jonin also lead 3-man cells of freshly promoted genin, it seems like there's a much greater throughflow of Genin through every state (academy, exams) than higher ranks.

Now, it's possible that this math is correct and that there's a very dark underlying problem. High genin mortality. While the 60 or so Genin from each village for the Chunin exams would require 20 jonin, if a lot of them die then the Jonin (and chunin) can be re-used again and again.

Of course, there's the question of why we don't see this, to which i also have an answer: sample bias.

100 00 ninja were fielded by the villages in the 4th war. We know maybe 100 or 200 characters. This suggests that the Naruto series is about the 0.1% of top ninja. Of the 200 ninja at the Exams, we really only saw about 20. We only saw Kakashi's generation of jonin, yet since the Academy didn't close down we can be sure that there are many more out there. We just don't see them.