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| Common Admission Test (CAT) |
| Description |
The Common Admission Test (CAT) is jointly conducted by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) - Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Indore, Kozhikode, Lucknow. Some of the most prestigious Indian Business Schools such as SP Jain, MICA, and T A Pai also take CAT score as an important criteria for their selection process.
The CAT is considered as one of the most important national standard for entrance to management institutes. Apart from the Indian Institutes of Management over 40 other Management Institutes use the CAT for short listing candidates. |
| Eligibility Criteria |
The candidate must hold a Bachelor’s Degree, with at least 50% marks or equivalent CGPA [45% in case of the candidates belonging to Scheduled Caste (SC)/ Scheduled Tribe (ST) or Persons with Disability (PWD) category], of any of the Universities incorporated by an act of the central or state legislature in India or other educational institutions established by an act of Parliament or declared to be deemed as a University under section 3 of UGC Act, 1956, or possess an equivalent qualification recognized by the Ministry of HRD, Government of India.
Candidates appearing for the final year of bachelor’s degree/equivalent qualification examination and those who have completed degree requirement and are awaiting results can also apply. Such candidates must produce a certificate from the Principal/Head of the Department/ Registrar/Director of the university/institution certifying that the candidate is currently in the final year / is awaiting final results and has obtained at least 50% marks or equivalent (45% in case of candidates belonging to SC/ST/PWD category) based on latest available grades/marks. |
| Exam Pattern |
The syllabus for the CAT Examination changes every year (or is tentative to change). Generally, questions from the following categories are frequently have appeared in the past: Verbal ability and reasoning, Reading Comprehension, Quantitative skills, Data Interpretation and Analytical and Logical reasoning.
Common Admission Test – CAT is a 2 hours test comprises of 3 sections with equal number of questions in each section. There is negative marking for wrong answers. Proficiency in all the sections is essential for getting a call from any of the IIMs.
- Quantitative Ability: The questions are designed to stress more on reasoning skills of the candidates, rather than on their computational skills. The level of difficulty of this section is perceived to be higher because the questions are not only lengthy to read but at times require more effort in terms of understanding and solving.
- Data Interpretation: As the name suggests, this section presents data to the candidate in forms such as caselets, pie diagrams, bar graphs, etc and questions are set to evaluate the candidate’s skills at analyzing the given information.
Data Sufficiency questions in this section are based on basic mathematics (at times Data Sufficiency is a part of the Quantitative Ability section).
- Reading Comprehension (RC): CAT usually has 6-8 passages in the RC section, with an overall length of 4500-5500 words and about 50 questions to answer in a span of about 30 minutes. However this too can vary according to the level of difficulty of questions.
- Verbal Ability: This section explores your understanding of the English Language and also tests you on Reasoning Skills. The questions in this section typically comprise sentence correction, sentence sequencing, verbal reasoning
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