CAT 2026 is on 29 November 2026, conducted by IIM Indore. Registration is open now and closes on 15 September 2026, at iimcat.ac.in. If you are reading this in early September, you have roughly four months. If you are reading it after the registration deadline has already passed you in your head a few times, you still have time, you just need to compress the plan rather than abandon it.
CAT is the gateway exam for the 21 IIMs and a long list of other business schools that accept the score. It is worth being precise about what it actually tests, because a lot of preparation time gets wasted on the wrong target.
What the exam actually rewards
CAT is computer-based, 120 minutes total, split into three sections with a fixed 40 minutes each. You cannot borrow time from one section to rescue another. That single rule shapes everything about how you should prepare.
The three sections are VARC (verbal ability and reading comprehension, 24 questions), DILR (data interpretation and logical reasoning, 22 questions) and QA (quantitative ability, 22 questions), 68 questions in total. Marking is plus three for a correct answer and minus one for a wrong one on multiple choice questions. Type in the answer questions, where you key in a number rather than pick from options, carry no negative marking.
Put those two facts together and the exam stops looking like a knowledge test and starts looking like a decision test. You are not being asked whether you know something. You are being asked whether you can, in a fixed 40 minute window, correctly judge which questions to attempt, which to skip, and when to stop pushing on one you are not getting. That is the actual skill CAT selects for, and it is also the reason a plan built only around content revision underperforms a plan that treats decision making as a skill to train separately.
The four month arc, in three phases
Do not build a rigid week by week grid this early. Build three phases, each with a clear job, and let your own diagnostic results decide how long each one runs.
Phase one is foundations. Your job here is coverage, not speed. Go through the syllabus for each section once, properly, so that nothing is genuinely unfamiliar. This phase ends when you can attempt a full length question from any topic without needing to relearn the concept from scratch, even if you are slow.
Phase two is section-wise strength building. This is where most of the four months should live. You now know what you know. Spend concentrated time on the topics inside each section where you lose the most marks, not the topics you find most interesting. Track this with actual results from your own practice sets, not a feeling.
Phase three is mock-heavy. In the final stretch, full length mocks under real timing become the main activity, not an occasional add-on. Content study shrinks to closing specific gaps the mocks expose. This is also the phase where your 40-minutes-per-section pacing needs to feel automatic rather than something you are consciously managing mid-test.
Section by section notes
VARC rewards reading volume more than any trick or shortcut. The reading comprehension passages cover unfamiliar subject matter on purpose, and the only real preparation is reading dense, varied material daily so that a difficult passage on an unfamiliar topic stops being intimidating by November. Build this as a daily habit from phase one, not a phase three cram.
DILR is often mistaken for a knowledge section. It is a selection section. Each DILR slot presents a handful of sets, and the single highest-leverage skill is choosing, right at the start, which sets are solvable inside your fixed 40 minutes and which are traps designed to eat far more time than the marks on offer are worth. Practise the selection decision as deliberately as you practise solving the sets themselves.
QA is where the marking scheme has the sharpest bite. With plus three for a correct answer and minus one for a wrong one, a single careless guess erases a large share of what one correct answer just earned you. That changes what a good QA strategy looks like. Accuracy on the questions you do attempt matters more than raw attempt count, and knowing which questions to leave alone is not giving up, it is the correct read of the marking scheme.
What mocks are actually for
A mock is not a rehearsal for the real exam so much as a source of decision data about your own preparation. The score matters less than the pattern behind it: which questions did you attempt and get wrong, which did you correctly skip, which did you wrongly skip because you panicked rather than judged.
Spend more time analysing a mock than you spent sitting it. Go through every wrong answer and every skipped question, and ask honestly whether the decision in the moment was the right one given what you knew at the time. That review is where the actual improvement happens between mocks, not in the sitting itself.
What a percentile cannot do for you
A strong percentile gets you a shortlist. It does not get you through the interview and group discussion round that follows, and it is worth being honest about that gap well before results day.
The interview panel is not going to re-test your quantitative ability. They are going to ask what you have actually done, whether that is a college project, a part-time role, or something you built on your own initiative, and they are going to probe it. "I got a good percentile" is not an answer to "walk me through a decision you made with incomplete information." A verifiable project you can speak about in specific detail is the strongest artefact a fresher can carry into that room, and it is worth having one ready well before your interview calls start arriving.
If you make it to the group discussion and personal interview rounds, the preparation shifts again, from timed problem-solving to structured argument and honest self-presentation. Our guides on group discussion and HR round preparation and mock interview preparation cover that stage in detail, and are worth reading now rather than after your results land, so you are not starting that preparation from zero with three weeks to go.
