Dear Aspirant,

One thing that seeps through is your confidence in yourself, which is a very good sign. Your marks may not impress and it is definitely not a true reflection of a student’s aptitude. Having said that the CAT examination is a test of a student aptitude and there is every possibility that you can do well provided you have a flare to excel in their testing pattern. The test consists of three sections:

• Verbal Ability/Reading/Comprehension

• Data interpretation & Logical Reasoning

• Quantitative Ability

We strongly suggest that you do a few mock tests on their website https://nta.ac.in/ which is under the student’s section. Once you understand the pattern then you will be able to access on how to prepare for the examination.  The standard is extremely high and even if you are OBC you need to in the above 96 percentile to stand a good chance.  The Logical Reasoning is very simple, there are around 3300 seats with 200,000 writing the exam, hence only  1.7% gets in and by correlation 100 – 2% = 98 Percentile. No work experience need at this stage. So now you know what needs to be done!

Good Luck

Gopal,  IIMs shortlist candidates for the interview stage based on their own criteria, which may be independent of each other. The process may include Written Ability Test, Group Discussion, and Personal Interviews. Performance in the CAT examination is an important component in the admission process. IIMs may additionally use other factors such as the previous 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 processes, academic cut-offs and the weights allocated to the evaluation parameters may vary across IIMs . This is IIM Bangalore's previous year's cut off across various Categories:

For all the Candidates shortlisted, the 10th and 12th board results are initially adjusted by dividing each such score by 90th percentile score of that board. And then  an adjusted score is calculated for the Bachelor's degree for each of the candidates based on the final scores obtained by the candidate are used for the Bachelor's degree and professional degrees. For example,
CAT = 40
10th board = 20
12th board = 10
Bachelors = 20
Gender Diversity = 2
Work Experience = 8
The 40 points for CAT are derived from the performance in each of the three sections as follows:
Verbal & Reading Comprehension - 14 points
Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning  - 16 points Quantitative Aptitude - 10 points.

So you will need atleast 95 percentile and more to be shortlisted for IIM Bangalore.