CAT 2025 Detailed Exam Analysis: Structure, Surprises, and Performance Benchmarks(SLOT 2)

CAT 2025 Slot 2 Exam Analysis : The Common Admission Test (CAT) 2025 Slot 2 maintained the overall pattern of moderate-to-high difficulty, without notable variations across sections. While the overall paper format remained unchanged, the section-wise difficulty and question dynamics shifted subtly, making this slot slightly trickier than Slot 1, especially in VARC and DILR.

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)

The VARC section leaned towards the challenging side, particularly due to dense and abstract reading comprehension passages. Two passages were philosophy-based, demanding high inference ability, while one was science-technology oriented, requiring conceptual interpretation. Para Jumbles were moderate, but summary and odd-sentence questions required nuanced understanding. Overall, high accuracy was more rewarding than attempts.

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)

The DILR section in Slot 2 was moderately tough, with one time-based arrangement set considered highly solvable. Two sets involved multi-layered data reasoning and conditional logic, requiring structured thought processes. A mixed data sufficiency caselet confused many test-takers due to ambiguous constraints. Set selection played a critical role, and students who began with the time-arrangement and tournament sets fared better. There were 7-8 TITA Questions.

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 in Slot 2 was comparatively moderate, with Arithmetic and Algebra dominating. Geometry had two questions that were conceptually deep but doable with the right visual approach. Number Systems was conspicuously lighter this year. Candidates with strong fundamentals found this section scoring, whereas those relying on shortcuts struggled with lengthy calculations.  There were 7-8 TITA Questions.

Ideal Attempt Strategy:

A good performance range was 10–12 accurate attempts toward higher percentiles.

Predicted Percentiles (QA):

Overall Impression

Overall, Slot 2 can be classified as Moderately Difficult, with major challenges in VARC and strategic complexity in DILR. QA was relatively friendlier but demanded precision. The percentile cut-offs are expected to be almost same as Slot 1.

Overall Predicted Percentiles: