What to Do in the First 10 Minutes of the CAT Exam

PRODUCTIVITY

Everything about CAT preparation is planned in detail except the part that happens first. Candidates know their chapter priorities, their mock schedule and their attempt strategy, and almost none of them have decided what they will do in the ten minutes after they sit down at the machine.

Those minutes decide more than their length suggests, because they set the state you carry into the first section, and the first section sets the tone for a paper you cannot revisit. This piece covers what actually happens in that window, what to do with it, and the two mistakes that quietly cost candidates a section before the section has properly begun.

Why the Opening Matters More Than Its Length

Ten minutes out of a 120 minute paper sounds like a rounding error. It is not, for two reasons.

The first is structural. There is a hard 40 minute sectional limit and no movement between sections, so time lost at the start of a section cannot be recovered from anywhere else. Five minutes of hesitation in the opening of a section is five minutes taken from questions at the end of it that you will now never see.

The second is about state. The opening minutes establish whether you feel settled or rattled, and that state persists. A candidate who meets a brutal question in the first ninety seconds and reads it as a signal about the paper carries that reading through the section, and it changes their selection decisions for the worse at exactly the moment those decisions matter most.

A Routine for the Opening Minutes

Read the Instructions, Genuinely

This looks like the throwaway item on the list and it is the one with the clearest downside if skipped.

You almost certainly know the structure: three sections, VARC, DILR and QA, hard 40 minute sectional limits, 120 minutes in total, and a marking scheme of plus three for a correct answer, minus one for an incorrect MCQ, zero for unattempted, with no negative marking on Type In The Answer questions. No change to the exam pattern was announced for 2026.

The point is not that you need reminding. It is that the on-screen instructions are where any change would be stated, and the cost of reading them is a minute while the cost of assuming is unbounded. Question counts and the MCQ to Type In The Answer split have moved between years, so the paper in front of you is the authority rather than your memory of a previous one.

Choose the First Question Deliberately

This is the highest-value item on the list and it contradicts what most candidates do by default.

Question one has no special status. There is no difficulty gradient, so a question that eats five minutes can sit at position one and a ninety second question can sit at position twenty. Starting at the top means accepting whatever the paper happened to put there at the moment you most need a settled start.

Instead, sweep the first several questions quickly and pick one you recognise and can finish. Completing it does two things: it banks three marks, and it establishes that the paper is tractable, which is the state you want for the selection decisions that follow. The cost of the sweep is well under a minute and it is the best minute in the section.

Minute	What you should be doing	What goes wrong instead
0 to 1	Physical setup, paper and pen ready	Starting to read before settling
1 to 2	Reading the on-screen instructions	Skipping them as already known
2 to 3	Fast sweep for a confident opener	Attempting question one by default
3 to 6	Completing that first question	Grinding on a hard opener
6 to 10	Settled into the normal pass method	Still rattled and deciding by feel

The Two Mistakes That Cost a Section

Both happen inside the first ten minutes and both are avoidable with a decided routine.

The first is grinding on a hard opening question. It is understandable: leaving the first question feels like starting badly, and there is a strong pull to prove you can do it. Four minutes disappear, the section is now behind, and the panic that follows makes every subsequent selection decision worse. The question was never worth it and its position made it feel important.

The second is skipping the settling entirely and starting fast. A candidate who begins reading before their pen is to hand and their screen is comfortable is doing two things at once, and the admin keeps interrupting the reasoning for the next several minutes. Thirty seconds spent first removes that.

The Section You Open With

One thing about the opening is not yours to choose, and it is worth being clear about rather than planning around.

The section order is set by the exam rather than by you, so the opening routine has to work regardless of which section it applies to. That is an argument for the routine being generic: settle, read, sweep, pick a confident opener. Those steps work identically whether you are opening with a reading passage, a set or a Quant question.

What does vary is what a confident opener looks like. In a reading section it is a passage whose first paragraph reads at normal pace. In a data and reasoning section it is a set whose structure you recognise and whose constraints look like they close early. In a quantitative section it is a question whose type you recognise with the end visible from the start. Same routine, three different applications, all rehearsable.

What a Hard Opener Actually Tells You

Since misreading the opening is the main state risk, it is worth stating what the information content of a difficult first question really is.

It tells you that this question is difficult for you. It does not tell you about the section, because there is no gradient and no reason the questions near the start should resemble the rest. A candidate who has swept several questions before committing has a much better sample than one who read a single question, and even that sample is small.

The practical protection is the sweep itself. Having looked at several questions, a hard one among them is obviously just one of several rather than a verdict, and the state damage does not occur. That is a second reason the sweep is worth its minute.

Where a Confident Opener Comes From

The routine depends on there being a question you recognise immediately, and that is not guaranteed. It is built.

Recognition on sight comes from volume within a question type rather than from general practice. A candidate who has worked through a chapter thoroughly enough reads a question from it and knows the shape before finishing the sentence, and that is exactly the question you want to open with. A candidate whose practice has been broad and thin has nothing that reads that way, and their sweep turns up several questions that are probably doable and none that are obviously so.

So the opening routine has an upstream requirement: at least a few areas where your fluency is deep rather than adequate. Arithmetic and Algebra have historically been the largest contributors to QA, which makes chapters like percentages sensible places to build that depth, since a question from a high-frequency chapter you know cold is the most likely opener to actually appear.

That is worth knowing because it reframes part of your preparation. Depth in a few recurring areas does not only buy you marks on those questions. It buys you a reliable start to the section, which is worth more than its share of the paper.

Rehearsal Is What Makes It Free

Everything above is easy to read and slightly harder to do at nine in the morning with a hall full of people and something important at stake.

The gap between reading and doing is closed by repetition under conditions that resemble the exam. Full length mocks in one sitting, sectional limits enforced, no pauses, and the opening routine run every single time including the mocks you take at home when nobody is watching. That is how a routine stops requiring a decision and becomes what your hands do.

A routine that has only been read about will not be available in the moment you need it, because the moment you need it is precisely when you have the least spare capacity to construct anything. That is true of every rule in this exam and it is most true of the first ten minutes, which arrive when you are least settled.

The Summary

The first ten minutes are short and they set the state you carry into a section you cannot revisit, under a hard 40 minute limit where time lost at the start cannot be recovered anywhere else.

Use them in order. Settle the physical setup before anything on screen matters. Read the on-screen instructions properly, because that is where any change would appear and your memory of a previous paper is not the authority. Confirm the marking and where the clock is. Sweep the first several questions rather than accepting question one, and open with something you recognise and can finish.

Then avoid the two mistakes: grinding on a hard opener, which costs minutes and then costs judgement, and starting before you are settled, which makes the admin interrupt the reasoning for the next several minutes. Write the routine down, run it in every conditioned mock, and it will cost you nothing on the day because it will not require a decision.

If the opening of your exam is the one part you have not planned, that is a cheap gap to close and it has an outsized effect. A CAT preparation strategy review will show what your current openings are costing you, and a personalised CAT preparation plan schedules the conditioned mocks that turn a routine into a habit.