CAT:Common Admission Test

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Common Admission Test

The CAT(Common Admission Test) conducted by the IIMs is a very competitive test conducted for admission to around 1250 graduate programs in management at the six campuses, and is usually considered one of the most competitive exams in the world, with a success rate of less than one in a hundred. Each institute conducts group discussions and personal interviews to evaluate the students shortlisted after the test. Around 195,000 students compete for less than 1200 general seats in the IIMs (As per 2006 figures) which makes it even more selective than all the top US business schools put together. Even with a top 1% score, a candidate must also successfully take the equally stringent group and individual interviews. The overall acceptance rate ranges from around 0.1% to 0.4% of the applicants (compared with the acceptance rate of around 5-10% in the top US schools)depending on the rank of the individual IIM, with the rate progressively increasing roughly according to the following order IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, IIM Kozhikode or IIM Indore. The remaining 23% of seats are reserved for candidates belonging to Scheduled Castes and Tribes and PWD. The Average persentile scores of the reservation category students is lesser than the percentile scores of the General class students, which generally hovers around 99 percentile.