CAT Registration 2019: Exam Dates, Syllabus, Pattern

CAT is the gateway to admission at 20 IIMs and over 100 B-schools across India.IIM Kozhikode is expected to conduct the examination on November 24th, with the notification released in all the national dailies of the country. Registration for the CAT 2019 is expected to begin from August 7 after10AM and the final date of submission of online application corrected in all aspects is will continue until September 18, 2019, by 5 PM.

The process of the registration is pivotal as it is the first step in the application process. Aspirants for the CAT 2019 should register online on IIM’s official site and ensure to fulfil the necessities of the process. The exam cities and centres for the examination shall be assigned to the candidates following the last date for CAT 2019 registration. The candidates are thus not advised to rush during the initial days of registration.

Overview of CAT 2019 Exam

Prospective candidates should be aware of some of the highlights of the CAT 2019 examination. More than 2.4 lakhs aspirants are expected to participate in the CAT 2019. Most of the colleges in the country accept the scores.CAT 2019 is a pre-requisite for admission to various Post Graduate and Fellow programmes of IIMs. The CAT 2019 scores are to be used by listed non-IIM member institutions. A list of such institutions is provided on the CAT website. IIMs have no
role in the selection process of in-IIM institutions.

Eligibility Criteria

Education Credentials : The candidate must hold a Bachelor’s Degree, with at least 50% marks or equivalent CGPA [45% in the case of candidates belonging to the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled
Tribe (ST) and Persons with Disability (PwD) categories].
• Candidates appearing for the final year of Bachelor’s degree/equivalent qualification
examination and those who have completed degree requirements and are awaiting
results can also apply.

Candidates applying for CAT 2019 should fulfill any one of the following conditions:
• Completed Bachelor’s degree with the required percentage of marks*.
• Completed professional degree (CA/CS/ICWA) with required percentage*.
• Should be in the final year of Bachelor’s degree with required percentage*.
CAT Eligibility
* SC/ST/PwD candidates should have minimum 45%. For General, EWS and NC-OBC
candidates, the minimum is 50%.

Age : There is no age restriction for application of CAT 2019.
Category : As per the legal requirements, 15% of the seats are reserved for Scheduled Caste (SC)
and 7.5% for Scheduled Tribe (ST) candidates. 27% of the seats are reserved for Other
Backward Classes candidates belonging to the “non-creamy” layer (NC-OBC). Up to
10% of the seats are reserved for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) candidates.

Format and Duration for CAT exam 2019

The duration of CAT 2019 examination is 3 hours and conducted in two sessions Morning and Evening with actual timings to be better considered from the actual notification. It shall be a computer adaptive test and thus speed on the computer is an added advantage in the examination.

Examination Fee

₹950 for SC, ST and PwD category candidates.
₹1900 for all other categories of candidates.
The candidate needs to pay the registration fees only once, irrespective of the number of institutes he/she is applying for. Fees once paid cannot be refunded under any circumstances

Test Centers

CAT 2019 Exam will be conducted in test centres spread across around 156 test cities. Candidates will be given the option to select any four test cities in order of their preference.

Important Dates of the CAT 2019 Examination

Regular updates on the dates of the examination are important to help the candidate with their preparation strategy. Knowing the dates can actually enable them to schedule their preparation considering the available time in hand. Also, the application process can be quite overwhelming for students who are not tech-savvy and are still used to Paper-based Test. Important dates associated with the exams are listed as under:

Events Date

CAT 2019 Registration – Start date 07th Aug 2019 10AM
CAT 2019 online application Correction End date 18th Sep 2019 5PM
CAT 2019 – Release of admit card and download
of admit card Oct 23rd 2019 5PM-Nov 24th,2019
CAT 2019 Examination date Nov 24, 2019
CAT 2019 – Result announcement Second week of January ,2020

Admission Process

The shortlisted candidates for the interview are on their own criteria which is independent of each other. The process includes Written Ability Test (WAT), Group Discussion (GD) and Personal Interviews (PI). Performance in the CAT 2019 examination is an important component in the admission process. There might be a probability that the institute might additionally use factors such as academic performance of the candidates, relevant work experience, gender and academic diversity and other similar inputs in shortlisting and ranking of candidates at various stages of the admission process. The cut-offs might vary with the IIM’s and the candidates are advised to check the website.

CAT 2019 Exam Results and Shortlisting

The CAT 2019 results are expected to be released by the CAT 2019 results will be tentatively available starting from the second week of January 2020 on this website. The list of candidates shortlisted for the
next level of selection will be made available on the website of the respective IIMs. Each IIM will send interview letters to the shortlisted candidates directly. The criteria for shortlisting varies with each institute. The candidates are expected to visit the admission websites of the respective IIMs for further information.

Syllabus and CAT 2019 Exam Pattern

SCORING SCHEME

CAT 2019 shall be conducted in two sessions. Two different Test Forms shall be administered in two TestSessions. In order to ensure fairness and equity in comparison of performances of candidates across different test sessions, the scores of candidates shall be subjected to a process of Normalisation. The Normalisation process shall adjust for location and scale differences of score distributions across different forms. After normalisation across different forms, the scores shall be further normalised across different sections. The Scaled Scores obtained by this process shall be converted into percentiles for purposes of shortlisting.

For reporting purposes, Scaled Scores for each section (Section I: Verbal Ability and Reading
Comprehension (VARC), Section II: Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR), and Section III:Quantitative Ability (QA)) and Total along with the Percentiles shall be published.
The process of Normalisation is an established practice for comparing candidate scores across multiple Test Forms and is similar to those being adopted in other large educational selection tests conducted in India, such as the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE). For normalisation across sections, we will use the percentile equivalence.