CAT 2024 on November 24; IIM Ahmedabad PGP admission policy, selection criteria

NEW DELHI: The Common Admission Test (CAT) 2024 will be conducted on November 24 in three sessions for admission to the postgraduate management programmes offered by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and participating B-schools. IIM Calcutta will conduct the exam in 170 cities.

The CAT 2024 question paper will consist of three sections – Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC), Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR), and Quantitative Aptitude (QA).

IIM Ahmedabad has announced the admission policy 2025. For admission to the 2025-27 batch of the PGP programme, the IIMA follows a two-step process. In the first phase, candidates who qualify CAT exam 2024 are shortlisted for Analytical Writing Test (AWT) and Personal Interview (PI) based on their performance.

IIM Ahmedabad admission policy 2025

The detailed IIMA admission criteria are as follows:

Preliminary screening

Only those candidates who obtain the following minimum cut-offs in the sectional percentile ranks, the overall percentile rank and a positive (greater than zero) raw score in all sections of CAT 2024 will be considered for all the subsequent stages

The selection process will utilize an applicant's 'Application Rating' (AR) score at various stages. This AR score is calculated by summing the individual rating scores labeled 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', and 'E'. Scores A, B, C, and D are derived from the applicant's percentage marks in Class 10, 12, bachelor's degree and work experience.

Shortlisting for AWT and PI

A select number of top candidates from each academic discipline will be shortlisted for the AWT and PI based on their composite score (CS). For each academic category (AC) where the total number of applicants to IIMA from the SC/ST/NC-OBC/PwD categories who appear for CAT 2024 is at least 100, the top 5% of candidates in their respective categories, referred to as ACRC groups, will be shortlisted for AWT and PI. This selection is subject to upper limits on the number of candidates per ACRC group.

CS (Composite Score) = ARF_CS * Normalised AR score + CATF_CS * Normalised overall score in CAT-2024

Final selection

At this stage, selection will be strictly based on the shortlisting of candidates within each category (General/SC/ST/NC-OBC/PwD) according to their Final Composite Scores (FCS). The FCS of a candidate who appears in AWT and PI will be calculated as follows:

FCS = PIF * Normalised PI Score + AWTF * Normalised AWT Score + CATF_FCS * Normalised CAT Score + ARF_FCS * Normalised AR Score