The Common Admission Test (CAT) 2024, a critical exam for entry into premier business schools across India, is scheduled for November 24, 2024. The exam will take place in three sessions, each with a unique test form. To ensure fairness in evaluating candidates who sit for different versions of the exam, the CAT organising body will implement a process of score normalisation. This approach adjusts for any variances in difficulty across the sessions, promoting equity in score comparison.
The normalisation process, a standard procedure in large-scale Indian exams like the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), accounts for location and scale differences in score distributions across different test forms. After the scores are normalised across these forms, they are further normalised within individual sections. This double normalisation ensures that candidates’ performances can be fairly compared, regardless of the specific session or test form they attempted.
For each candidate, scaled scores will be calculated for each of the three sections: Section I (Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension, or VARC), Section II (Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning, or DILR), and Section III (Quantitative Ability, or QA). The scaled scores, along with the overall score, will then be converted into percentiles, which represent each candidate’s relative performance compared to other test-takers. These scaled scores and percentiles will ultimately be used by institutions to shortlist candidates for further admission rounds.
CAT 2024 is administered as a gateway for entry into a variety of postgraduate and doctoral programmes at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and other institutions that accept CAT scores. The test results are used by 21 IIMs as well as over 1,000 other MBA institutions across India, including prestigious non-IIM schools such as FMS Delhi, SJMSoM IIT Mumbai, MDI Gurgaon, DoMS IIT Delhi, and SPJIMR Mumbai.
With CAT scores holding significant weight in the admissions process for India’s top business schools, the normalisation procedure is essential to maintain the exam’s integrity and ensure that each candidate’s score is a fair representation of their performance. The exam will be conducted across numerous cities in India, offering candidates from diverse locations the opportunity to compete for admission into these highly regarded programmes.
As CAT 2024 approaches, candidates are gearing up for this competitive test, knowing that their scores will be carefully adjusted through normalisation to ensure a level playing field across sessions and sections, ultimately determining their placement among India’s top business schools.
