CAT 2020 Notification: Registration, Application Form, Eligibility Criteria

CAT 2020 Eligibility Criteria

There is an eligibility criteria for CAT 2020 like there is for any year's CAT exam. The exact CAT 2020 eligibility criteria have been released as a part of the CAT 2020 notification. The CAT 2020 Eligibility Criteria is given below:

• In order to be eligible for the CAT Exam, the candidate has to pass at least their Bachelor's degree with at least 50% (for General Category and for candidates from the NC-OBC caste). For SC/ST and Differently Abled (DA) candidates, the percentage required is 45%.
• For the Degree to be counted, the University who has awarded the degree has to be recognized by the MHRD.
• If the University awards grades or CGPA instead of marks, the conversion factor given by the University has to be used. If there is no conversion factor specified by the University, the CGPA has to be converted into percentage by direct conversion i.e. divide the CGPA received by the highest CGPA possible and multiply the result by 100.
• Candidates who have completed their professional degrees with over 50% (45% for SC/ST/PwD) are also eligible for CAT.

CAT 2020 Registration and Application form

According to the CAT 2020 Notification, each candidate has to fill out the CAT 2020 application form from the official CAT 2020 site in order to appear for the exam.
The steps in filling out the CAT 2020 Application form are detailed below according to the previous years’ CAT Application forms:

• The candidate needs to register as a new user and fill out his/her personal details on the first page of the CAT 2020 application form.
• Personal details of family members are to be filled in the form
• Following this, the academic details have to be added to the form (the marks of all the subjects have to be used in calculating the aggregate percentage irrespective of the policy of the board).
• The next section includes the work experience details
• The penultimate form section to be filled includes the choice of programs that the candidate wishes to apply to (IIM A, IIM B, IIM C, New IIMs, etc.)
• The final section to be filled includes the test center city in which the candidate wishes to appear for CAT Exam 2020. Most of the time, the centers are allocated according to the wishes of the student.
• Following this, the payment of the application fee has to be made.
• Upon payment, there will an email sent to the email ID filled as a confirmation of the payment as well as sharing the status of the application.
• All future correspondence will be through this email ID.

Some of the documents required for this process are:

• Scanned photograph and signature of the candidate
• Grade Sheet from Xth and XIIth standard
• Other documents depending on the candidate's qualifications (Work Experience Letter, Graduation Certificate, etc.)

CAT Exam 2020 Syllabus

The CAT 2020 exam syllabus will remain the same as the syllabus for CAT 2019. There are three sections in the form of:

• Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC)
• Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR)
• Quantitative Aptitude (QA)

The VARC and QA sections consist of 34 questions while the DILR section consists of 32 questions.
Here is the expected marking scheme of CAT 2020.

• Each MCQ question has a marking scheme of +3/-1 while the TITA question has no negative marking which makes the marking scheme +3/0.
• Each section is allocated 1 hour without exception and time is not carried over from one section to the other.

Therefore the candidate needs to be competent across all sections rather than scoring heavily in any one or two sections. In the same spirit, there are usually sectional cutoffs for most of the better colleges.

The VARC section is majorly interpretation based and not vocabulary based, due to which it does not have a fixed syllabus. Thus reading level and grammar rules of Class X and some practice would allow the candidate to adequately prepare for the CAT exam 2020 syllabus for the VARC section.

The DILR section has no fixed exam syllabus and only practicing different types of sets can help the aspirants prepare for the DILR section of the CAT 2020.
The QA section, like the VARC section, consists of topics from the CBSE Class X syllabus. The major topics in QA include:

• Algebra
• Arithmetic
• Numbers
• Geometry
• Modern Maths