CAT 2026 Admit Card Releases November 4; Exam November 29

IIM Indore will open the CAT 2026 admit card on November 4 at iimcat.ac.in. The exam is on November 29 in three slots. About 2.84 Lakh students signed up, down 3.7% from last year.

IIM means Indian Institute of Management. Business Standard reported the November 4 date on October 27. CAT is the Common Admission Test for MBA seats.

Fewer sign-ups do not mean an easier paper. A percentile is a rank, not a score. The cut-off does not fall just because the queue got shorter.

When does the CAT 2026 admit card come out?

IIM Indore opens the card on November 4. Log in at iimcat.ac.in with your user ID and password.

The card prints your name, roll number, photo, centre address, reporting time and slot.

No release time has been given. Careers360 expects about 10 a.m. IST, going by past years. Treat that as expected, not confirmed.

Print it on A4 paper. Carry one original photo ID too.

What are the CAT 2026 slot timings on November 29?

Slot 1 runs 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. IST. Slot 2 runs 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. IST. Slot 3 runs 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. IST.

Business Standard and Careers360 both list these three windows. Each slot lasts 120 minutes.

Reporting times are messier. MBAUniverse puts Slot 3 reporting at 3:00 p.m. in its table, and at 3:30 p.m. in its own FAQ.

Gate closing splits too. Career Launcher shuts the Slot 3 gate at 4:15 p.m. MBAUniverse says 3:15 p.m.

Two coaching sites. One of them disagrees with itself. Only your card settles this.

How many students registered for CAT 2026?

Careers360 reports about 2.84 Lakh sign-ups for the exam. That is 3.7% below the 2.95 Lakh of 2025.

It sits 13.7% under the 2024 peak of 3.29 Lakh. Two years of decline, then.

Signing up is not the same as turning up. Of the 2.95 Lakh who signed up for 2025, about 2.58 Lakh sat the paper, Careers360 reports.

Roughly 37,000 stayed home.

Does a smaller applicant pool mean lower CAT cut-offs?

A smaller pool promises nothing. Careers360 says the drop does not promise lower cut-offs.

Here is the judgement, and it is ours. The 99th percentile still means finishing ahead of 99 in every 100 who sit the paper.

A smaller pool does not move that share. How hard the paper is decides your score, and a sign-up count says nothing about that.

What is the CAT 2026 exam pattern?

CAT 2026 is a computer-based test of 120 minutes. It holds three sections of 40 minutes each. You cannot go back once a section closes.

Careers360 lists 68 questions worth 204 marks. VARC carries 24 questions, DILR 22 and QA 22.

VARC is Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension. DILR is Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning. QA is Quantitative Ability.

Each right answer adds 3 marks. A wrong choice question costs 1 mark. Type-in-the-answer questions carry no minus marks.

Students with a disability get 160 minutes. That works out to 53 minutes and 20 seconds a section.

What are the four last-minute CAT tips from an expert?

Pawan Kumar, a knowledge expert at the coaching firm TIME, gave Careers360 four steps for the last stretch.

1. Read your last 8 to 10 mock tests before you sit a new one.
2. Sort each mistake into four buckets: a concept you never learned, a question you misread, a maths slip, or plain rushing.
3. Count the marks you gained and lost, not the questions you tried.
4. Practise questions you have not seen before, not sets you solved already.

Pawan Kumar’s main point is narrow. Study one mock fully before you start the next.

His section advice is just as tight. For VARC, find the central idea and strike out options using the text itself. For DILR, judge which sets to pick. For QA, name the concept the question is testing.

Mock test ke marks gir rahe hain, to ab kya karein?

Stop taking new mocks for two days. Read your last 8 to 10 papers instead. Fix the one section bleeding the most marks.

You have 26 days left. That is room for about 8 more mocks, at one every three days.