You saw the news that IIM Indore is likely setting CAT 2026, and your first reaction was to open three coaching blogs and a Reddit thread trying to figure out whether that means an easier paper or a brutal one. You have started tweaking your study plan around it — more DILR because "Indore loves logical sets," less of something else. Half your prep energy this week has gone into predicting a paper that does not exist yet. The conducting IIM for CAT is the single most over-analysed thing in the entire aspirant community, and this blog is about why it should change almost nothing about how you prepare.
What the conducting IIM for CAT actually decides
Every year, one of the six oldest IIMs runs the exam on a rotation basis — registration, question paper, logistics, result. For CAT 2026 that is expected to be IIM Indore, following the cycle. The last time Indore conducted CAT was 2020, the COVID year, when it cut the exam to 120 minutes and 76 questions. So yes, the conducting IIM for CAT sets the paper, and different institutes do leave a mild fingerprint on style.
Here is the honest version of that fingerprint, from a decade of data. IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Calcutta have historically leaned toward tougher papers. IIM Kozhikode and IIM Indore have usually kept difficulty moderate. IIM Lucknow set one of the hardest QA sections in recent memory in 2023. IIM Calcutta in 2024 ran a more manageable paper but quietly dropped Para Jumble questions from VARC entirely. These are real patterns. But notice what they are: small shifts in flavour, not a different exam. The syllabus, the three sections, the marking scheme of plus three and minus one, the sectional time limits — none of that changes based on the conducting IIM for CAT.
Even the structural tweaks that do happen are smaller than they sound. When IIM Calcutta ran 2024, it shifted DILR from the usual four sets of five questions each to a mix of three sets of four and two sets of five, and nudged the total from 66 to 68 questions. That sounds dramatic if a coaching ad frames it that way. In practice, an aspirant who had drilled DILR set selection properly barely felt it, because the underlying skill — reading a set fast, judging whether it is solvable, and committing — is identical no matter how the questions are grouped. The conducting IIM for CAT can rearrange the furniture, but the room is the same room. Your job is to be good in any room.
Why the conducting IIM for CAT should not move your strategy
The coaching industry has a reason to make you obsess over this. Predictions sell courses. "Indore will make DILR tricky, join our Indore-special batch" is a marketing line, not a study strategy. The people who actually score 99-plus percentile will tell you something duller: their preparation did not change based on the conducting IIM for CAT.
The logic is simple once you see it. You cannot know the difficulty in advance, and even the coaching institutes and the IIMs themselves cannot guarantee it. There is a well-observed balancing tendency — if a section was brutal one year, it often eases the next, which is why aspirants keep trying to predict swings. But a tendency is not a rule. If you prepare assuming CAT 2026 will be easy because 2025 was hard, and it turns out tough, your percentile collapses. The only safe assumption is the worst case. Prepare for a hard paper across all three sections, and an easy one becomes a pleasant surprise rather than a plan that fell apart.
There is a second reason the conducting IIM for CAT barely matters: the score is relative. CAT is percentile-based, so you are not fighting the paper, you are fighting every other candidate who saw the same paper. If Indore sets an easy DILR, it is easy for all two and a half lakh of you, and the cutoff simply rises. When CAT 2024 turned out moderate, the 99 percentile score climbed to around 95 raw marks. A harder paper pulls the cutoff down. Either way, your job is the same: outperform the field, not the paper.
This relative-scoring point also quietly dissolves another worry aspirants pin on the conducting IIM for CAT: the slots. The exam runs in three slots on the same day, and their difficulty is never perfectly equal — in CAT 2024, Slot 1 was widely felt to be easier than Slot 3. Aspirants panic about being assigned a "hard slot." But this is exactly what normalization exists to fix. The IIMs statistically adjust scores across slots so that a tough Slot 3 does not punish you relative to an easier Slot 1. You do not choose your slot and you cannot game it, so it belongs in the same mental bucket as the conducting IIM for CAT: real, out of your control, and correctly handled by a process you do not need to worry about. Worrying about it changes nothing except your sleep.
The numbers that should actually shape your prep
Forget the conducting IIM for CAT for a moment and look at the figures that matter. CAT 2025 saw about 2.95 lakh candidates register but only 2.58 lakh actually appear — a chunk of registered aspirants never showed up, down from 3.28 lakh registrations the year before. That tells you something useful: a meaningful share of your "competition" self-eliminates before the exam. The people who stay consistent to November are already ahead of a large drop-off group.
The exam itself is stable. Expect roughly 68 questions across VARC (24), DILR (22), and QA (22), 40 minutes per section, no section switching, computer-based across three slots on the same day. TITA questions carry no negative marking, which is free territory most aspirants underuse. These facts do not shift with the conducting IIM for CAT, and they are what your plan should be built on. A weak section is what kills percentiles, not the conducting IIM for CAT setting the paper. Mock tests plus honest analysis drive the majority of real improvement.
It helps to see how little the institute actually reshapes things. Look at the last three years. IIM Lucknow ran 2023 with a genuinely tough QA and DILR. IIM Calcutta ran 2024 at a moderate level and even trimmed a question type. IIM Kozhikode handled 2025. Three different institutes, three slightly different flavours — and in every one of those years, the aspirants who did well were the ones with strong fundamentals and disciplined mock practice, not the ones who guessed the institute's style correctly. The through-line is preparation, not prediction. If you had built your CAT 2023 plan entirely around "Lucknow sets hard QA," you would have over-indexed on one section and neglected the others, which is exactly the trap the conducting IIM for CAT conversation pushes people into. The institute changes; the discipline that wins does not.
Where a conversation beats another prediction blog
The hard part of CAT prep is rarely the syllabus. It is knowing whether your DILR set-selection is actually improving, whether your mock analysis is deep or just a score you glance at, whether the plateau you are stuck on is a technique problem or a nerves problem. Reading one more article about the conducting IIM for CAT will not answer any of that. Talking to someone who cleared it recently often will, in fifteen minutes. The obstacle is usually access — most aspirants do not personally know a converted IIM student to ask. Platforms like eSalahKaar let you get on a short call with verified students from the IIMs you are targeting, billed by the minute, so you pay only for the actual conversation instead of a full mentorship package. You can see how the format works on the how it works page. Worth bookmarking if you are stuck on a specific section and want a real diagnosis instead of a generic prediction.
Other ways to get past the prediction spiral
A call is one route, not the only one. A few other approaches genuinely help here:
1. Study old papers across multiple conducting IIMs. Instead of guessing what Indore will do, work through actual CAT papers from 2019 to 2025. You will feel firsthand that the variation between institutes is smaller than the community makes it sound, and you build range for any style. Community threads on PaGaLGuY where past takers break down slot-by-slot difficulty are useful for calibrating expectations honestly.
2. Build a worst-case attempt strategy. Decide in advance how you will handle a section that opens harder than expected — which questions you skip first, how you protect your strong section. This is a plan you can make now, and it works no matter who sets the paper. It is far more valuable than any difficulty prediction.
3. Fix your weakest section, not your fears. If DILR is your weak point, the conducting IIM for CAT is irrelevant — DILR being hard hurts you and helps a strong DILR candidate regardless of the conducting IIM for CAT. Pour your energy into the gap in your own profile. That is the one variable fully in your control.
Each has a trade-off. Old papers take discipline. A worst-case plan needs honesty about your weak spots. Fixing a weak section is slow. But every one of these beats refreshing prediction blogs, because they build something the paper cannot take away from you. If you are unsure whether a short call is even worth it for your specific stage of prep, the FAQ covers how aspirants use these conversations to diagnose a plateau before spending months on the wrong fix.
The mindset that keeps you sane until November
The shift worth making is this: treat the conducting IIM for CAT as trivia, not strategy. It is genuinely interesting that Indore, Ahmedabad, and Lucknow each have a house style. It is genuinely useless as a reason to rebuild your study plan in July. Every hour you spend predicting the paper is an hour not spent getting better at the paper, and the conducting IIM for CAT is not worth a single one of those hours.
So before you tweak anything based on the Indore news, ask one question: would this change be worth making even if I did not know which IIM was conducting? If the answer is yes, do it. If the answer is "only because Indore is setting it," drop it. The aspirants who convert are not the ones who predicted the paper correctly. They are the ones who prepared so thoroughly that the prediction did not matter. What has pulled most aspirants off track this year is not a hard section — it is the hours lost to guessing one that has not been written yet.