The Common Admission Test (CAT) is a prestigious, computer-based entrance exam conducted annually by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and various other renowned management institutes across India.  CAT, a computer-based test (CBT) is conducted online around November every year in multiple cities. WAT/GD-PI rounds are conducted from February to April.

Eligibility for CAT Exam:

• The candidate must be a graduate with minimum of 50% marks or equivalent CGPA (45% in case of SC/ST/DA/PWD) or possess an equivalent qualification recognized by the Ministry of HRD, Government of India.
• Candidates appearing for the final year of the bachelor’s degree / equivalent qualification examination and those who have completed degree requirements and are awaiting results can also apply.

CAT Exam Test Duration & Pattern:

The makers of CAT do not want it to become predictable, so they keep on changing its pattern. Analysis of the last few years' papers reflects that the allotted time for the paper has gone up significantly. For example in CAT 2000, there were 165 questions to be done in 120 minutes, while in CAT 2015 there were only 100 questions to be done in 180 minutes. Thus the real challenge in CAT is not the time constraint, it is the difficulty level of the paper. Apart from changes in the allotted time, CAT has also undergone numerous changes in the number of sections, marking schemes, and question types. For example, a significant feature of recent CAT papers (CAT 2015 onwards) was non-MCQs in which the correct answer had to be typed in the given space.

Here is a detailed analysis of the CAT papers over the past 9 years.

Percentile Score Calculation

Calculation of the percentile score of a candidate:

Step 1: Calculate the total number of candidates \(n\) who appeared for CAT (i.e. including morning, afternoon and evening sessions).

Step 2: Assign a rank \(r\), based on the scaled scores obtained in the QA section, to all candidates who appeared for CAT. In the case of two or more candidates obtaining identical scaled scores in the QA section, assign identical ranks to all those candidates.

As an illustration suppose exactly two candidates obtain the highest scaled score in the QA section, then both of those candidates are assigned a rank of 1. Moreover, the candidate(s) obtaining the second highest scaled score in the QA section are assigned a rank of 3 and so on.

Step 3: Calculate the percentile score \(P\) of a candidate with rank \(R\) in the QA section as:

\(\color{blue}{P = \left( {\frac{{n - r}}{n}} \right) \times 100}\)

For example, if a candidate ranks 1500 out of 200,000 CAT examinees, then the percentile score of the candidate will be \(\color{blue}{\left( {\frac{{200000 - 1500}}{{200000}}} \right) \times 100 = 99.25}\)

Step 4: Round off the calculated percentile score \(P\) of a candidate up to two decimal points.

For example, all percentile scores greater than or equal to 99.995 are rounded off to 100, all percentile scores greater than or equal to 99.985 but strictly less than 99.995 are rounded off to 99.99 and so on.

A methodology similar to the one described above is used for the computation of the overall CAT percentile scores and for the percentile scores of other sections.