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CAT

General Information

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.

CAT Test Registration: The CAT test application form is the same for all IIMs. You can get this form from any branch of the State Bank of India. The form is usually available in the month of April. It should be noted that the CAT test application form is to be filled and submitted only once, irrespective of how many IIMs you are applying to.

However, for non-IIM institutes, you might have to fill a separate form available from their institute.

Exam Pattern

The syllabus for the CAT Examination changes every year (or is subject to change). Generally, questions from the following categories have frequently 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 2.5 hours test comprising 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

Complete CAT Course

Important Dates

Closing date for receipt of completed applications: 25th April, 2011, 4.30 p.m.

Entrance examination: 05th June, 2011, 10.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.

Counseling: 13th July, 2011

Commencement of course: 22nd July, 2011

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