Note From Editor -> Free CAT Mocks 2025: Daily Sectionals!
The Setup
I come from a science + engineering background. Plus, I had been an avid book reader since childhood. I thought this meant that the CAT syllabus was going to be a cakewalk for me. But back in May 2024, when I decided to begin my preparation with a “mock zero” , reality hit pretty hard.
I scored terribly. The answers to the VARC questions were not as ‘intuitive’ as I had previously assumed, and I was not nearly fast enough at solving the QA and DILR questions as I needed to be. But I wasn’t too surprised. The mock wasn’t meant to boost my ego—it was a starting point, a baseline meant to help me identify my strengths and weaknesses and align my prep accordingly to maximise my outcomes. Now armed with this valuable information, I was confident I was only going to move forward from here.
The Hustle
I knew I didn’t want to take coaching because I was sure with the right amount of research and discipline, it was perfectly possible to structure your prep and score well without it. What I did utilise to the fullest were prep channels on YouTube, Arun Sharma books, and free mocks available online.
As I was working a full-time job with an afternoon shift, I had to carefully plan out my day to make time for preparation. My work hours were 12 PM to 9 PM so I used to study for 2 hours in the morning before my shift started and 2 hours in the night after my shift ended. On weekends, I was able to put in a few more hours and attempt some practise tests too.
The Turning of Tides
My prep wasn’t perfect. Some days I was too tired to study at all. Some days I tried to overcompensate and ended up burning out. Some days I felt that I should have started preparing earlier and that I didn’t have enough time. But I could see improvement in my performance and that’s what kept me going. Mocks went from soul-crushing to mildly encouraging as they started reflecting real progress.
Enter: CAT 2024
Finally, the day of the exam arrived. At this point, I was fairly confident in myself as I had practised a lot and had been scoring well in the past few mocks. The most important thing for me was to not take a lot of stress and overthink about how my exam was going DURING the exam (something I was guilty of back during JEE times). This helped me immensely in the exam, as I was able to focus completely on the problems at hand and not cloud my mind with irrelevant thoughts. I was satisfied with my performance that day (well, I didn’t get to attempt as many questions as I wanted to in QA but I fared better in DILR than I usually did in mocks, so I didn’t mind it that much)
The day of the results. I was anxious but soon overjoyed when I finally saw my percentile
I celebrated with my family that day, feeling relieved that a major hurdle of the MBA admission process had been crossed, if not conquered. I knew the interview season started from January itself so I decided to start interview prep soon after. My first goal was to identify which post-MBA function I felt myself gravitating towards the most (yes, I hadn’t given it a thought until after CAT xD) and what outcomes I was expecting after an MBA.
Enter: XAT 2025
After long nights of research on each function and detailed discussions with multiple b-school alumni working in different roles, I realised that I could narrow down my interests to three particular fields:- strategy consulting, product management and human resources.
Armed with this knowledge, I decided to shape my story around my interest in these domains for my interview preparation. Somewhere in December, I realised that XLRI Jamshedpur, one of the colleges I had registered for through the XAT examination coming up in January, was one of the most coveted colleges for pursuing a degree in human resource management. This suddenly brought XLRI way up on my priority list of MBA colleges, and I decided to take the XAT exam a bit more seriously than I previously was.
Here, I was introduced to a new section unique to this exam, the DM or Decision-Making section. I was instantly engaged with solving DM problems as they tested your ability to make the best possible decisions in real life situations. I also fortunately found myself able to somehow select the correct answers intuitively and didn’t have to worry about this new section as much as I thought I would have. With a high percentile in CAT bolstering my confidence, I managed to carry forward the momentum in XAT 2025 and ended up scoring an even better percentile.
Calls & Interview Season
I had a very strong academic record with more than 90% marks throughout my 10th, 12th and graduation. I also 1.5 years of work experience in a Fortune 500 company and a summer internship with one of the Big 4 during my undergrad years. I thought my profile coupled with my high percentile meant I had basically guaranteed myself a spot in one of the top IIMs as long as I didn’t completely butcher my interviews. While I had already begun daydreaming of life in a tier-1 b-school, I was given a rude awakening soon. The top IIMs released their interview calls one by one:
IIM L calls out! – not shortlisted :)
IIM C calls out! – not shortlisted :)
IIM A calls out! – not shortlisted :)
IIM I calls out! – not shortlisted :)
IIM B calls out! – not shortlisted :)
IIM K calls out! – not shortlisted :)
I was suddenly hit with the realization that not only was I not going to be joining the 6 top IIMs in the country, I wasn’t even being given the chance to butcher the interviews at all xD.
I must confess that I felt a lot of disappointment after I didn’t receive calls from my target colleges. However, I steeled myself as there were 3 more colleges I was really aspiring towards that were yet to release calls. Fortunately, I ended up getting interview calls from all three:- FMS Delhi, XLRI Jamshedpur & IIM Mumbai.
It was time to prepare for interviews in a more focused and diligent manner now that I knew exactly which colleges I was aiming for. As I had made up my mind about only going for these three B-schools and nothing else, I did not plan to attend the interviews for any other calls I received, some of which included IIFT Delhi, MDI Gurgaon, SJMSOM IIT Bombay, CAP IIMs, etc. I didn’t have full faith in those decisions at the time I made them and honestly won’t recommend anyone else to do the same either as attending more interviews is always better, if only for practice. Thankfully, as you know, it all ended up working out, so I don’t dwell on it :P
Interview prep wasn’t just “revise academics” and “know your work ex.” I went deep:
- Read a ton of online interview transcripts
- Caught up on current affairs and notable news from the past quarter
- Built a foundation for domain knowledge and HR-specific questions
- Practised GDs and mock interviews
- And of course, I took a lot of help and advice from my friends
The interviews came one by one. My preparation came through. All the interviews felt like genuine conversations and not a rapid-fire interrogation round, a large part of which was because I was prepared, and more importantly, clear about why I was sitting there. I was satisfied with my interview performance, and now it was time to wait for the results to come in.
Final Scorecard
✅Direct convert for XLRI Jamshedpur BM & HRM
✅Convert after waitlist for IIM Mumbai MBA Core, OSCM & SM
✅Convert after waitlist for FMS Delhi
Did it feel surreal? Absolutely. Even before celebrating, my first reaction was to breathe a sigh of relief that a year of hard work and efforts was not going to go in vain after all.
Now the good kind of dilemma, where do I go? What followed was a lot of deliberation and tons of phone calls, yet I still couldn’t make up my mind. Each of these colleges was fantastic and there was no way to go wrong yet I couldn’t make the final choice.
I was discussing it with my best friend and he said something that sealed it for me. He reminded me that FMS Delhi had always been my original dream college for almost 2 years. For a year since before I had even started preparing for CAT or even knew much about the MBA ecosystem at all, I had declared to him (perhaps in jest?) on multiple occasions that I would be taking admission in FMS Delhi. At that time, it had just been a joke because that’s how impossible it felt to me. But I realised that a college that I had then looked at as a distant and unattainable dream was actually in my grasp now and the realisation ended up making me emotional.
So yes, I’ve decided to go ahead with FMS Delhi, which not only is one of the most premier institutes in the country for a degree in management, but also my original dream college and as a bonus, just half an hour away from home. :P
Real Takeaways (No BS)
There are a lot of things I want to share, which would probably take too much time to jot down so I’ll talk about the three major bits of advice I feel every CAT aspirant should know:
⚠️ Don’t wait to “complete the syllabus” before taking your first mock. Just take it as soon as you can. It’ll tell you exactly what needs fixing. In fact, start your preparation with a mock. Even if you score poorly, it doesn’t matter. Better to know your weaknesses early so that you can gear your whole preparation schedule accordingly. Instead of going topic-by-topic, wasting time brushing up on topics you’re already good at, you’ll be able to put more time into topics that you actually need to improve on.
⚠️ You don’t necessarily need coaching. Not everyone can do well following the same laid-out preparation plan. Different strokes for different folks, as they say. Figure out your own roadmap based on your strengths and weaknesses and follow through.
⚠️ You do not need an “accountability partner”. You need to learn to be accountable yourself. All you need is a strong plan, self-discipline, and honest self-assessment, and you will perform well. If you need someone else’s help to keep you consistent and focused, then you’re doing it all wrong.
⚠️ Stay calm. I can’t stress this enough—your mindset on exam day matters more than the number of mocks you attempted. You will always score better than someone who’s a bit more prepared than you, but not composed during the duration of the test.
Good luck to everyone reading this. And to the old version of me, scratching my head at a confusing box plot in DILR:
You did it, buddy. :)
But there’s loads more to do still.
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