The Common Admission Test is a very popularly known entrance exam that is conducted once every year by the Indian Institutes of Management. The exam is very popular among the students who are aspiring to pursue various programs in their management degrees. The CAT entrance exam helps the students to enter various IIMs and other business schools that will provide greater opportunities for the students to improve their future. This becomes a very important aspect for the students, and the preparation of the exam is the key role that students are working for. While the students are trying to gather all the information possible regarding the exam, they make sure that the CAT syllabus is something they are very clear about. Through this article, we will try to understand the various topics that are a part of the CAT 2026 syllabus and how students need to have clarity over these topics to become better in their preparation.

Exam Pattern for CAT

There are mainly 3 sections of the CAT exam, which are Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension, Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning, and Quantitative Aptitude. Different sections have different numbers of questions. The VARC section has 24 questions. The DILR section has 22 questions and the QA section has 22 questions.There is a sectional time limit in the CAT exam of 40 minutes.

The CAT examination is a computer-based online exam, usually conducted in the month of November. There are a total of 68 questions in the CAT examination. The question types in the CAT exam are MCQ-based and TITA-type questions. For the marking scheme of the CAT exam, 3 marks are awarded for every correct answer. There is no negative marking in the TITA questions, and there is a negative marking of 1 mark for incorrect MCQ-based questions.

CAT Exam Syllabus for Each Section of the Exam

1. Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension

This section of the CAT exam is basically testing the English language skills of the students. Therefore, all the question topics that are part of the CAT syllabus of this section are mainly focused on grammar and vocabulary. There are various topics such as fill-in-the-blanks, paragraph completion, inference-based questions, reading comprehension, verbal logic questions, subject-verb agreement, parajumbles, idioms, synonyms, analogies, antonyms, sentence correction, parts of speech, prepositions, etc.

2. Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning

This part of the CAT exam focuses on testing the analytical and reasoning skills of the students. These both skills hold a lot of importance when students are trying to become better individuals in workspaces. Therefore, even as an entrance exam, this section is important. In the CAT syllabus for this section, there are topics such as blood relations, clocks and calendars, syllogisms, series statements, venn diagrams, propositions, data arrangement, data structure, family tree, coding, decoding, puzzles, seating arrangements, etc.

3. Quantitative Aptitude

This section of the CAT exam can be almost termed as the mathematical section. All the topics in this section are based on topics that are related to mathematics. According to the CAT syllabus in this section, there are topics such as geometry, number systems, percentages, probability, trigonometry, square roots, arithmetic, algebra, mensuration, etc.

Tips to Cover CAT Syllabus

There are certain tips that are common for all students and these tips can help the students to keep their preparation for the exam in check. The first and important tip regarding the CAT syllabus and preparation for the students is to form a strategy. When students do this, they will have a timeline and an estimate of how they're going to go about their preparation. The second thing that students need to keep in mind is that their first focus is the completion of the syllabus so that they have knowledge about all the topics when they are moving towards doing any other practice paper.

After this, students can try all of the topics, and they should solve questions so that the clarity of thought is analyzed. This will eventually help the students to perform better in the actual exam and give them exposure of a different kind. One more important thing that the students can do is that they can make sure that they add a variety of topics to their learning so that they don't get bored easily. This can mean that the students can start actually with taking one topic from VARC section, one topic from DILR section and one topic from QA section and merge all of them up so that their experience in learning is different. This will not bore the students and will make sure that they find different topics interesting in this way they will be able to learn more and better for the exam.

Conclusion

It is one thing for students to gather the knowledge of all of these topics in the syllabus, and then it is different to actually start working on preparing for the exam. Students should try that they actually have a preparation plan in mind that will help them to move ahead in a very productive manner towards the exam preparation. The CAT examination syllabus is important to the students because it will tell the students which topics they need to have preparation over. But actually the study material and other practice material will help the students to improve upon their preparation. Therefore, for a holistic preparation, students should make sure that they are giving importance to every aspect and working with the intention of scoring great percentiles to see themselves in good institutions.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. In which mode is the CAT exam conducted?

The CAT exam is a computer based online exam which is conducted at various different allocated examination centers which are mentioned on the admit card of the students. The students need to go to the examination centers and appear for the exam.

2. What types of questions are there in the CAT examination?

There are mainly two kinds of questions in the category exam, which are multiple-choice questions and type-in-the-answer-type questions. The majority of the CAT exam has MCQ-based questions, and each section will have few TITA questions.

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