CAT Common Admission Test

CAT is open to anyone holding a bachelor's degree, and there is no age limit and no cap on the number of times you may sit it. The conditions are about the degree, not about you.

• Degree: a bachelor's degree of at least three years from a university recognised by the UGC, or a qualification recognised as equivalent by the Association of Indian Universities.
• Marks: at least 50% in aggregate, or an equivalent CGPA. The bar is 45% for candidates in the SC, ST and PwD categories.
• Final-year students: may apply, and are admitted provisionally. The degree must be completed and the marksheet produced by the date the admitting institute sets, usually within the first term.
• Professional qualifications: CA, CS and CMA are accepted on the same percentage basis.
• Conversion: where a university awards only a CGPA, that university's own conversion formula is used. Where it publishes none, the CGPA is converted by dividing by the maximum and multiplying by 100.

Meeting the eligibility bar is not the same as being shortlisted. Each IIM sets its own minimum percentile, and those are almost always well above the qualifying floor.

The application is a single online form on the official CAT website. The IIM that convenes CAT changes from year to year, and so does the notification, but the form itself has been the same shape for a decade.

Pay the fee only through the official site. No agent can register you for CAT, and nobody can raise a score once it is declared.

A CAT score admits nobody by itself. It is the gate, not the decision: every IIM publishes its own admission policy before the results, and the weight given to the score after the shortlist is often smaller than candidates expect.

Scores are reported as percentiles, not marks, and are normalised across the test slots so that a harder session is not a disadvantage. Several hundred schools outside the IIMs accept the same score and run their own processes on top of it.

Three sections, forty minutes each, and the clock moves you on whether you are finished or not. That single rule shapes how CAT is prepared for: choosing what to leave is as much of a skill as solving.

• VARC rewards reading you did months ago. Long-form non-fiction, daily, does more for this section than any question bank.
• DILR is won in the first five minutes, on which sets you pick. Practise selecting sets under a timer, not just solving them.
• QA leans heavily on arithmetic — ratios, percentages, averages, time and work. Fluency in these matters more than reach into advanced topics.
• Marking: three marks for a correct answer, one off for a wrong MCQ, nothing off for a wrong TITA. A TITA question is therefore always worth attempting; a coin-flip on an MCQ is not.
• Mocks are diagnostic, not practice. The analysis afterwards — which sets you should have skipped, where the time went — is the part that moves the score.