CMAT and IIFT Admission: Dates, Pattern and What Changed

Exam Updates

An aspirant building a shortlist in September puts CMAT and IIFT in the same row of the spreadsheet. Both are NTA exams, both feed good business schools, both seem to want a registration in the autumn and a paper in the winter. It is a reasonable assumption and it is half wrong.

One of these is a live exam with a confirmed recent pattern and a cycle you can plan around. The other has not conducted an entrance test since 2022 and now admits entirely on CAT score. Putting them in the same row leads to a calendar with a phantom exam in it, and the phantom quietly absorbs study hours that had somewhere better to be.

IIFT: The Exam That No Longer Exists

The change is old enough that it should be settled knowledge and recent enough that most search results have not caught up.

IIFT announced that from the 2024-25 academic year it would use CAT scores for admission to its MBA in International Business and MBA in Business Analytics. Its published 2026-28 prospectus confirms the position: the score used is CAT, and selection then moves to a group discussion and personal interview conducted in person across cities including Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Lucknow and Indore.

The last IIFT paper was written on 18 December 2022. Since then there has been no IIFT exam date, no IIFT admit card and no IIFT question paper, which means there is nothing about IIFT that belongs in a written preparation plan.

CMAT 2026: The Most Recent Confirmed Pattern

CMAT is a genuine live exam, and the January 2026 sitting gives you a reliable picture of what the paper looks like.

Section	Questions	Marks
Quantitative Techniques and Data Interpretation	20	80
Logical Reasoning	20	80
Language Comprehension	20	80
General Awareness	20	80
Innovation and Entrepreneurship	20	80

That is 100 questions and 400 marks over 180 minutes, delivered as a computer based test. Marking is plus 4 for a correct answer and minus 1 for a wrong one, with no penalty for leaving a question unattempted.

Two structural features stand out against CAT. There are no sectional time limits, so you move freely between sections and decide your own allocation. And two of the five sections, General Awareness and Innovation and Entrepreneurship, are knowledge sections rather than aptitude sections, which is a category of preparation CAT does not ask for at all.

The Two Sections CAT Preparation Does Not Touch

Three of CMAT's five sections map cleanly onto CAT preparation. Quantitative Techniques and Data Interpretation, Logical Reasoning and Language Comprehension are all served by work you are already doing, with adjustments of format rather than substance.

The other two are genuinely new. General Awareness tests current affairs and static knowledge. Innovation and Entrepreneurship tests familiarity with startup and business concepts, and it is a compulsory section rather than an optional one.

Together they carry 160 of the 400 marks, which is 40 percent of the paper. That proportion surprises aspirants who assume CMAT is a lighter version of CAT, and it is the single biggest reason a strong CAT candidate can score unremarkably on CMAT without anything going wrong in the aptitude sections.

The Two Paper Audit: 3 Checks Before You Build the Calendar

Before either exam goes into your plan, run these three checks. They take ten minutes and they prevent the two most common planning errors of the season.

Where to Check, and Where Not To

NTA's own microsites for these exams are not reliably current. The IIFT schedule page still displays the 2022 examination date, and the CMAT site has carried a previous cycle's scorecard link well after that cycle ended. Use the institute's prospectus for IIFT and NTA's main notification listings for CMAT, and treat a stale microsite as a caution rather than as information.

What to Do While CMAT 2027 Dates Are Pending

The CMAT 2027 notification had not been published at the time of writing. Based on the previous cycle, registration opening through the autumn with an exam in January is the pattern to plan around, but treat that as an expectation rather than a date. Do not build a calendar that breaks if the notification lands two weeks later than you assumed.

How Much of a Season CMAT Deserves

For a CAT-focused aspirant, the honest answer is not much until CAT is done. The aptitude sections are already covered, and the two knowledge sections respond well to a short concentrated effort in the weeks between CAT and CMAT. Front-loading CMAT-specific study in October is usually time taken from the paper that matters more.

How Free Section Movement Changes Your Strategy

The absence of sectional time limits is the feature of CMAT that CAT aspirants adapt to worst, largely because it looks like a relaxation of a constraint rather than a new problem.

On CAT, the sectional wall makes your time allocation for you. You cannot overspend on quant because the exam will not let you. On CMAT, nothing stops a difficult Logical Reasoning question absorbing four minutes, then another, until the section you were strongest at receives whatever is left of the three hours.

The solution is to bring your own walls. Decide the allocation before you sit down, write the four switching times on your rough sheet in the first minute, and treat them as though the software enforced them. Twelve minutes each for the two knowledge sections, and the remaining time split across the three aptitude sections, is a reasonable starting shape to test in a mock.

What makes this genuinely hard is that the cost of overspending is invisible in the moment. You never see the marks you would have earned in the section you rushed, so the feedback only arrives when the result does.

Why CMAT Suits a Post-CAT Window So Well

The timing of CMAT is unusually convenient for a CAT aspirant, and it is worth using deliberately rather than by accident.

A January exam sits well after CAT, which means your aptitude preparation is at its absolute peak and requires no maintenance work at all in the interim. The three aptitude sections are effectively already prepared on the day CAT ends.

That leaves a clean several-week window in which the only genuinely new work, the two knowledge sections, can be done concentrated rather than spread thin. Knowledge sections reward exactly this shape of effort: current affairs studied in December and January is more current than current affairs studied in September, and startup and business concepts are quick to cover when you are not also juggling chapter revision.

An aspirant who front-loads CMAT preparation into October is therefore doing the right work at the wrong time, paying for it in CAT hours and getting staler knowledge in return.

Eligibility and Registration for CMAT

CMAT eligibility is broad. A bachelor's degree in any discipline qualifies, final year students may apply provided results are declared before admission, and there is no age limit. Registration for the previous cycle opened in mid October with the window extending into late November, and the fee differed by category and gender.

Specific fee figures and deadlines change cycle to cycle, so take them from the information bulletin NTA publishes with the notification rather than from a summary. That bulletin is the only document that is authoritative on the year you are actually sitting.

What Your Season Should Look Like With Both in View

Once the phantom exam is removed and the live one is sized correctly, the plan becomes noticeably simpler.

IIFT Needs Application Attention, Not Study Time

Your task for IIFT is administrative and then conversational: apply within the window with your CAT score, then prepare for the group discussion and interview stage. Neither requires quant or verbal revision beyond what CAT already demands.

CMAT Needs a Short, Concentrated Block

Two sections of genuinely new material, worth 40 percent of the paper, handled in the weeks after CAT rather than spread thinly across the autumn. Concentrated effort suits knowledge sections better than a long drip anyway.

CAT Stays the Centre of the Calendar

Both routes now depend on CAT more than they used to, IIFT completely and CMAT through three of its five sections. A personalised CAT preparation plan that keeps your chapter sequence intact while making room for a short CMAT block is the structure this season actually needs. If you want a second opinion on whether your current allocation is realistic, a CAT preparation strategy review will show where the extra papers are quietly costing you.