CAT 2021 Eligibility Criteria| Important Announcement

CAT 2021 Announcement

For an aspirant to be eligible to appear for the CAT 2021 exam, the requirement till today was that the aspirant has at least 50% marks or equivalent CGPA in their bachelor’s programme. There was a 5% relaxation given on this criteria for candidates belonging to the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Persons with Disability (pwD) categories, making it 45% marks or equivalent CGPA in their bachelor’s programme.

However, due to the pandemic and uncertainty all around , several candidates were awarded a “promotion/pass” certificate instead of “marks” certificate in the last two years, and hence were sceptical about the eligibility of their candidature.

After receiving several queries from students regarding the same and considering how the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the disruption of evaluations across the country, an official announcement clarifying the issue has been released today.

Points to note!

The important points to note in this official announcement are as follows:

1. Candidates with “promotion/pass” instead of “award of marks” certificates in any of the last two years of the bachelor’s program can enter the “Promotion or Pass” option in the CAT 2021 application form. This allows the candidate to complete the application form despite the requirements of the Bachelors programme marks’ eligibility criteria.
2. The above mentioned relaxation is also applicable to the final year students with “award of marks”.
3. The exception of entering “promotion/pass” option instead of the marks secured is available only to candidates whose graduation years are either 2021 or 2022.
4. Taking into consideration that there could be different evaluation patterns adopted by different universities across the country due to Covid-19 pandemic and to maintain parity, the minimum percentage of marks eligibility criteria has been removed for the candidates graduated in 2020 and 2021 who are appearing for the CAT 2021 exam.
5. This relaxation is only applicable for CAT 2021 and students will be required to look at and follow respective institutions’ specific admission policy if any.

The above announcement has been released by the CAT Committee on iimcat.ac.in today, i.e. 18^th August 2021. You can read the official announcement below. If you wish to download the same, press the download button below the announcement preview.

Make sure that you keep this relaxation in mind while registering for CAT 2021, if not done already.

If you have any other queries related to the form filling and registering process for CAT 2021, click on the below article: CAT 2021 Form Filling Ready Reckoner. This article will take you through the step by step form filling process and help you with all the frequently asked questions and mistakes made by candidates while applying.

Cheers and Best Wishes!

Vibhuti Sharma works with 2IIM as a Product head.