CAT 2026 — Complete MBA Entrance Preparation Course

The Common Admission Test is the entrance examination for the Indian Institutes of Management and is accepted by several hundred other business schools across India. It is conducted by the IIMs on a rotating basis, normally once a year in late November, and is scored on a percentile basis — which means you are not competing against a syllabus so much as against everyone else who sat the paper. This course covers all three CAT sections: Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension, Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning, and Quantitative Ability. The paper is 68 questions for 204 marks in 120 minutes, delivered as three sectionally time-locked blocks of 40 minutes each — 24 questions in VARC, 22 in DILR and 22 in QA — taken in a fixed order you cannot change. When a section's timer ends you move on and cannot return. Marking rewards judgement as much as knowledge. A correct answer earns +3 and a wrong MCQ costs −1, but the type-in-the-answer (TITA) questions carry no negative marking at all, so a TITA left blank and a TITA guessed wrongly cost exactly the same. A basic on-screen calculator is provided, which changes what 'calculation-heavy' means in practice — CAT rewards structural insight far more than arithmetic speed. Eligibility & who can join: • A bachelor's degree with at least 50% marks or equivalent CGPA (45% for SC, ST and PwD candidates). Final-year students may apply, subject to producing proof of completion. • There is no age limit and no cap on the number of attempts. • No specific graduation discipline is required — the course builds Quantitative Ability from foundations, which matters for candidates who have not studied mathematics since Class 10. How the course is structured: The course is taught section by section — VARC, DILR and QA — in the order the paper presents them, with topics sequenced by their real weight in recent papers. Because each section is capped at 40 minutes and cannot be revisited, question selection is taught as an explicit skill from the beginning: in DILR especially, choosing the right two or three sets to attempt is worth more than solving quickly. Every topic combines concept building, technique and timed practice, followed by sectional papers and full-length mocks under the exact 40-40-40 lock with the on-screen calculator available. CAT is normally held once a year in late November; always confirm dates against the official notification at iimcat.ac.in.