CAT (Common Admission Test) is a highly competitive exam which is a gateway to all the IIMs and over 1000 business schools in India. It is conducted by the 6 primary IIMs on a rotational basis. The exam is taken online over a period of two hours, with 40 minutes per section. CAT is conducted on the last Sunday of November, every year. The exam will be held online in 3 slots across the same day. Over 2 lakh candidates register for CAT every year. CAT results are expected between the 3rd week of December and to 2nd week of January. This exam is important as it is mandatory for all 20 IIMs as well as many other business schools. Details of the top b-schools accepting the CAT score are provided in the Colleges and Cut-offs section.

•Bachelor's degree with 50% or above (45% or above for Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Persons with Disability (PWD)/Differently Abled (DA) classification).

•Your degree should be granted by any of the universities which fall under Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956, or possess an equivalent qualification recognized by the Ministry of HRD, Government of India.

•You should have graduated or be appearing for the final year of your bachelor's degree examination in the next year, to be eligible for CAT in this year.

•You need to be shortlisted by the b-school and then successfully complete the selection process (Personal Interview, Written Ability Test, etc.) in order to gain admission to an IIM or other b-school.

The CAT exam is a 2-hour exam, held across 3 slots. Timings of the slots were 8:30 am to 10:30 am; 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm and 4:30 pm to 6:30 pm.

The section wise details are given below, based on CAT 2022. In comparison to CAT 2021, IIM Bangalore, the convenor of the exam in 2022, has replaced the Odd One Out type questions in the VARC portion to Sentence Insertion type questions. In DILR section, the number of questions in each set became 5 instead of 4 or 6.

The authorities do not come out with a specific syllabus, but we can prepare based on the previous years' question papers. The questions asked in CAT are mostly based on high school Maths and English topics. DILR is a bit different, using critical reasoning as well as numerical calculations. Here are the section wise topics for CAT

The CAT 2023 application is available on the official CAT website. Application for the IIMs is part of the same form.

IIMs and expected CAT percentile required for General category

1. IIM Ahmedabad: 99+
2. IIM Bangalore: 99+
3. IIM Calcutta: 99+
4. IIM Lucknow 98+
5. IIM Indore: 97+
6. IIM Kozhikode: 98+
7. IIM Shillong: 90+
8. IIM Raipur: 93+
9. IIM Ranchi: 93+
10. IIM Rohtak: 95+
11. IIM Trichy: 94+
12. IIM Udaipur : 92+
13. IIM Kashipur: 93+
14. IIM Nagpur: 95+
15. IIM Amritsar: 95+
16. IIM Sambalpur: 94+
17. IIM Bodhgaya: 92+
18. IIM Jammu: 93+
19. IIM Visakhapatnam: 92+
20. IIM Sirmaur: 90+

These are based on student experiences in the general category. In addition to the CAT percentile, IIMs consider a combination of other criteria such as your academic scores, work-experience, academic diversity, gender diversity

Top Colleges (Non IIMs) that Accept CAT Scores