CAT 2025 Detailed Exam Analysis: Structure, Surprises, and Performance Benchmarks (Slot 1)

CAT 2025 Detailed Exam Analysis: Structure, Surprises, and Performance Benchmarks

CAT 2025! Are you the one who wrote CAT this year? Or the one who will be writing CAT 2026? For both, this article is going to be not just beneficial but also an eye opener.  The Common Admission Test, commonly known as CAT was conducted today i.e. on November 30, 2025, by IIM Kozhikode this year, brought moderate surprise elements. However, it did maintain its traditional structure. The paper upheld CAT’s reputation of rewarding accuracy, smart selection, and composure under time pressure, rather than mere speed or question volume.

Overall Structure and Key Changes

CAT 2025 retained its sectional timing format of 120 minutes, divided into three 40-minute sections. There were 68 Questions. 3 Marks for correct response and -1 for incorrect. No negative marks for TITA (Type in the answer) questions.  

• Addition of Para-Jumbles in VARC was the most notable structural change.
• DILR was tricky, so selecting easy cases was the key.
• The section-wise layout — 40 minutes per section — remained unchanged.

Section-Wise Analysis

1. Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC)

VARC was easy to moderate across slots, with a clear RC dominance: 16 RC questions, featuring four passages with four questions each. VA questions focused on paragraph completion, summaries, para jumbles and odd-one-out. Para Jumbles made a comeback. There were 4 TITA Questions.

Ideal Attempt Strategy:

Attempting 16–18 questions with 80% accuracy should give you a good percentile. Students who prioritized easy-to-read passages will certainly do well.  

Predicted Percentiles (VARC):

2. Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR)

DILR featured 22 questions, divided into five sets — two 5-question sets and three 4-question sets. There were 7-8 TITA Questions. One Case was based on DI and rest were based on LR. The section was tougher than last year and the overall difficulty was Tough. Students who could attempt 2 sets with good accuracy would fetch good percentile.

Ideal Attempt Strategy:

Targeting 8–10 questions with 85%+ accuracy will be considered as strong performance. The key was picking the right two or three scoring sets early, rather than attempting all.

Predicted Percentiles (DILR):

3. Quantitative Ability (QA)

QA was quite challenging, dominated by Arithmetic. The questions were fairly tough and students found it difficult to attempt a lot of questions. Most of the questions tested students on multiple areas rather than one. There were 7-8 TITA Questions.

Ideal Attempt Strategy:

A good performance range was 9–11 accurate attempts toward higher percentiles.

Predicted Percentiles (QA):

Overall Impression

CAT 2025 can be classified as moderately challenging, student-friendly in design but strategically demanding. It reinforced that CAT is no longer just a test of knowledge but a test of choices, clarity, and composure.

Overall Predicted Percentiles: