It is 1 a.m. and you are not studying. You are scrolling your CAT prep Telegram group. Someone just posted a screenshot — 99.2 percentile in this week's mock. Below it, three people arguing that arithmetic is a waste of time and you should "only do geometry." You took the same mock and got 71. Your chest tightens. You open the leaderboard again, just to confirm how far behind you are. This is the habit nobody warns you about: comparing your CAT mock score to a hundred strangers, every single day, until your own preparation starts to feel pointless. Comparing your CAT mock score to people whose situation you know nothing about has quietly become your worst study habit. This blog is about why that habit is actively costing you marks — and what to do instead.
Why Comparing Your CAT Mock Score Feels Productive but Isn't
Comparing your CAT mock score feels like research. You tell yourself you are "benchmarking," figuring out where you stand, learning from toppers. But sit with what actually happens when you compare your CAT mock score to someone else's. You learn one number. You learn nothing about how they got it — what they were weak at six months ago, how many hours they put in, which background they come from, whether that 99 was a fluke slot or a consistent pattern. A single percentile is a result with all the useful information stripped out.
And the number you are comparing against is not even stable. The CAT percentile is relative — it tells you how many people scored below you on that specific mock, with that specific difficulty level and that specific pool of test-takers. The same raw score can be a 95 percentile in one mock and an 88 in another. Different mock providers scale differently; a TIME mock and an iQuanta mock and an official-style mock are not the same yardstick. So when you compare your CAT mock score to someone in a different mock series, you are not even comparing the same thing. You are comparing two numbers that were never on the same scale.
Here is the part that stings. There is real evidence this habit lowers your actual score. One aspirant wrote about spending two full days obsessing over someone else's mock percentile — two days in which he completely failed to notice that he had improved his own score by 20 marks in the previous ten. He could not see his own win because he was too busy measuring himself against someone else's. That is the real cost of comparing your CAT mock score: it makes you blind to your own progress, which is the one signal that actually matters.
The Three Ways Comparison Sabotages Your Prep
It is not just a mood problem. Comparing your CAT mock score reaches into your actual preparation. Comparing your CAT mock score does specific, measurable damage to how you prepare. Three mechanisms, all of them quiet.
It makes you change a working strategy. You see someone post "I skipped arithmetic and got 98 in QA," and you panic and drop arithmetic too. But that worked for one person with one profile. Someone else relied on careful formula notes for QA — the exact thing a Telegram post called a "waste of time" — and those notes won him four extra questions on exam day. When you compare your CAT mock score to a stranger and then copy their method, you are outsourcing your judgment to someone whose weaknesses are nothing like yours. Their shortcut is your landmine.
It floods you with contradictory noise. Join any CAT prep group and within an hour you have seen one person swear by daily reading, another call it useless, a third say skip DILR sets entirely and only do past papers. These are not strategies. They are opinions wrapped in false certainty, and the more you compare your CAT mock score to the people posting them, the more you treat their confidence as data. Your brain ends up so full of conflicting advice that you cannot hear your own analysis anymore.
It moves your eyes off the only useful number. Comparing your CAT mock score makes you forget what the mock was for. The point of a mock is not the percentile. It is the analysis afterward — which questions you got wrong, which you skipped that you should have attempted, where you wasted four minutes you did not have. When the percentile becomes the thing you fixate on, you stop doing the analysis. You compare your CAT mock score, feel bad or relieved, and close the laptop. The actual learning never happens.
What to Track Instead of Other People
The fix is not to quit mocks or leave every group. It is to change what you measure. Stop comparing your CAT mock score sideways, against other people, and start comparing it backwards, against your own past self.
Compare Yourself to Your Own Last Five Mocks
The only benchmark that means anything is your own trend line. Is your accuracy in the questions you attempt going up? Is your number of silly errors going down? Are you finishing sections you used to run out of time on? Pull your last five mocks and look at those three things. A move from 65 to 73 percentile across a month is a real win, even if someone in your group is at 95. You are not racing them. You are racing the version of you from last month.
Track Accuracy and Selection, Not Just the Percentile
Comparing your CAT mock score to a leaderboard hides the two numbers that actually matter. Two numbers tell you more than any percentile. First, accuracy — of the questions you actually attempted, what fraction did you get right? Low accuracy means you are attempting questions you should be leaving. Second, selection — did you pick the right questions to attempt in the first place? A good CAT attempt is often about leaving the two killer questions alone and banking the eight easy ones. Neither of these shows up when you compare your CAT mock score to a leaderboard. Both show up in your own analysis sheet.
Build One Error Log You Actually Revisit
Comparing your CAT mock score to others teaches you nothing here; an error log does. Keep a single running document of every mistake type. Calculation error in QA. Misread the question in VARC. Spent too long on a DILR set that was never going to crack. Over weeks, patterns emerge, and those patterns are worth more than any topper's screenshot. This is the work that moves your percentile. Comparing your CAT mock score to others is the work that feels like progress while moving nothing.
There is one more thing that helps more than any group: a single honest voice instead of a hundred anonymous ones. The trouble with comparing your CAT mock score in a Telegram group is that nobody there knows your specific situation, and everyone speaks with the same loud confidence. Platforms like eSalahKaar let you do a 1:1 voice call with a verified student from an IIM at per-minute pricing — so you pay only for the minutes you actually talk, not a coaching package. You can show one person your last few mock analyses, your real weak areas, and ask "given my profile, what should I actually fix first" — instead of guessing from a screenshot posted by someone whose situation is nothing like yours. If you want to see how the per-minute format works before trying it, the how it works page explains it in a couple of lines. Worth bookmarking if the group noise has started getting to you.
Other Ways to Break the Comparison Habit
A mentor call is one way to stop comparing your CAT mock score to everyone else. There are simpler, free things you can do today to stop comparing your CAT mock score every night:
1. Mute the leaderboard, keep the doubt-solving. Stop comparing your CAT mock score the moment a mock ends. Most CAT prep groups are genuinely useful for one thing — getting a stuck question explained. They are useless for the percentile-screenshot ritual. Mute the group, check it only when you have a specific doubt, and never open it right after a mock. The trade-off: you lose the "moral support" of the group, which some people genuinely need to stay consistent.
2. Write your own target before you see anyone else's score. Before each mock, write down the percentile you are aiming for based on your own last attempt. Judge the result against that, not against the group, so you are no longer comparing your CAT mock score to a stranger's. The trade-off: it takes discipline to set your own bar and ignore everyone else's, and on bad days you will be tempted to peek.
3. Read a few real interview-experience archives. Sites like PaGaLGuY have years of posts from people who panicked over mocks, scored a "low" 92, and still converted a strong IIM — and others who topped mocks and froze on exam day. It is a useful reminder that the mock percentile is not destiny. The trade-off: it is scattered and time-consuming, and none of it is calibrated to your specific profile.
Each has a cost — lost support, required discipline, or hours of unfiltered reading. The right mix depends on what is actually pulling you into the comparison spiral. If it is loneliness, you need a real person, not a muted group. If it is anxiety about where you stand, you need your own trend line, not theirs.
The One Question to Ask Tonight
Before you open that group again tonight, try this: look only at your own last three mocks and write down one number that has improved. Accuracy, attempts, a section score, anything. The aspirants who crack CAT are rarely the ones who watched everyone else's percentile most closely. They are the ones who kept their eyes on their own sheet long enough to actually fix what was on it. So here is the real question — if you stopped comparing your CAT mock score to everyone else for one full month and only competed with last month's you, what would actually change?