CAT 2026: The Common Admission Test (CAT) 2026 is scheduled for November 29, 2026 (Sunday), conducted by IIM Indore across three sessions.
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Section wise break up
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0 to 40 Minutes — VARC: Passages flickered across the screen. He moved steadily through the reading sets, tackling the non-negative-marking TITA (Type-In-The-Answer) summary questions to build early momentum.
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40 to 80 Minutes — DILR: The screen auto-switched as the sectional clock expired. He scanned the four reasoning sets, picked the two cleanest matrix caselets, and solved them methodically, resisting the temptation to rush into a third high-risk puzzle.
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80 to 120 Minutes — QA: The final stretch. Arithmetic and algebra dominated the queue. With $+3$ earned for every correct answer and $-1$ looming for every wrong MCQ attempt, precision took priority over speed.
Since the dates for CAT notification are out, heat has been turned up on the CAT students. With less than 2 months to go for the exam now, it is imperative that those serious about making it through to the IIMs change gears on their preparation. Some students would be wondering if they really have it in them to make it through the CAT exam, after the initial set of mocks that they have taken. But, if one can identify the weak areas and put in a focused effort to improve upon them, the CAT will be a much tamer animal than it would appear to be otherwise. It is now the Time to Strengthen on your STRONG areas rather than focussing on something NEW learnings.
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Some students would have covered a good portion of the syllabus, and those who have should start working on their test strategies if they haven’t. For students who have the question, “I haven’t started my preparation. Do I still have a chance at clearing CAT?”, the answer is “Yes !”. However, time is of the essence, and it will fly by faster than you know.
Verbal Ability (VA)
This includes Para Jumbles correction in para/ vocabulary usage /sentence completion /critical reasoning / summary questions.
Following are a few approaches to answer these questions:
- Identify the introductory statement (this statement would tell us what the paragraph is all about)
- Then identify links that would connect the two sentences. These are called connectives. These connectives can be conjunctions (but, and) or can be content connectives like cause–effect, generic to specific etc.
Reading Comprehension (RC)
- CAT has traditionally been an RC-centric paper, for English. The number of passages is expected to be four, based on the patterns seen in the last few years.
A few critical factors in RC preparation:
- Reading on diverse topics
- Focussing on basic grammar
- Target all direct questions followed by partially inferential questions.
