How CAT VARC Difficulty Has Changed in Recent Years

VARC

Ask whether VARC has got harder and you will get confident answers in both directions, usually from people who sat one paper each. The question deserves better treatment than either, and the honest version turns out to be more useful than a trend line would have been.

Difficulty in VARC is not a measurable property of a paper. It is a relationship between the passages and the people reading them, and the mechanism that converts marks into percentiles absorbs most of the variation anyway. What can be described is the section's character, and that is where something genuinely worth knowing sits.

Why a Difficulty Trend Cannot Be Drawn

Three problems defeat every attempt, and they are worse in VARC than in quant.

The first is that difficulty here is unusually reader dependent. A passage on economic history is straightforward for one candidate and opaque for another, far more so than a quant question is. Aggregate enough individual verdicts and you learn about the cohort's reading backgrounds as much as about the passages.

The second is that the proxies people use are contaminated. Cutoffs, average scores and topper counts all move with cohort size and preparation quality, so charting any of them as difficulty is an assumption rather than a measurement.

The third is that the paper has changed shape. Recent papers have run roughly 66 to 68 questions in total, and in the 2022 paper VARC carried 24 questions worth 72 marks with a 40 minute sectional limit. Comparing difficulty across differently shaped papers is not a like for like reading.

What Percentile Does to the Question

This is the part that makes most of the debate beside the point, and it is worth stating precisely.

Percentile is your position relative to everyone who sat the exam. If a VARC section is genuinely harder, scores fall across the room at once, and a modest raw score sits higher in the distribution than it otherwise would. The difficulty affects everyone simultaneously.

Normalisation adds a second layer, since CAT runs multiple slots which do not receive identical papers, and the process exists to make scores comparable across them.

None of that makes difficulty irrelevant. It makes it far less consequential to you individually than it feels on the day, because you are not being scored against the passages. You are being scored against the room.

If the section is	Your raw marks	Everyone's marks	Your percentile
Harder than usual	Lower	Also lower	Roughly unchanged
Easier than usual	Higher	Also higher	Roughly unchanged
Harder in your slot only	Lower	Higher elsewhere	Normalisation adjusts

What Is Describable: Character, Not Level

Here is where a useful answer exists, and it is about the shape of the section rather than its severity.

RC Dominance Is the Planning Fact

If RC carries the majority, RC accuracy effectively is your sectional score, and no amount of skill at para jumbles compensates for weak comprehension. That has held regardless of which year anyone thinks was harder, which makes it more useful than any difficulty claim.

The Prose Register Is the Rehearsable Part

Humanities and social science writing that argues rather than reports is the register to become comfortable in. A candidate who has read a dozen essays of that kind finds the fourteenth less alien, regardless of whether the specific subject matches.

Implicit Arguments Change How You Read

A passage that withholds its thesis punishes the reading style that news writing trains, where the essential information comes first and you can stop at any point. That is a real and stable property of the section and it is worth adapting to deliberately.

What Does Vary, Honestly

Some things do move and they are worth naming without inflating them into a trend.

The question count has moved, along with the paper's overall size. The mix between reading comprehension and verbal ability has shifted within the section. The proportion of type-in questions has changed, and that one is underrated: type-in questions carry no negative marking, so a paper with more of them is materially more forgiving to attempt even if nothing about the passages changed.

Subject matter varies between papers, which is why any given year can feel harder to a candidate whose reading happened to be in a different area.

What none of that assembles into is a direction. Variation between years is not the same as a trend across them, and reading one as the other is how confident difficulty claims get made from three data points.

What This Should Change About Your Preparation

Almost nothing, and that is the useful conclusion rather than a dismissal.

The work that pays in a hard VARC section is the same work that pays in a gentle one: sustained reading of argued prose, accuracy measured per passage rather than overall, a firm rule about leaving questions you cannot resolve to a single supportable option, and a rehearsed opening scan.

What is worth adding is deliberate range. Include passages on subjects you find uncomfortable rather than gravitating toward the ones you enjoy, and sit some blocks that are harder than you expect the real thing to be, so decision making under difficulty is rehearsed rather than improvised.

And stop consuming difficulty speculation, which is unverifiable, unactionable and reliably arrives in the weeks when your attention is most valuable elsewhere.

The Comparison Worth Making

Compare yourself across papers rather than comparing papers to each other. If your accuracy per passage and your count of unresolved attempts improve across a term of past sections, the preparation is working, and that conclusion is safe however the papers differed.

Where the Late Gains Actually Are

If the exam is close, comprehension will not move and decisions will. Removing coin flip attempts raises the score immediately, since a wrong multiple choice answer deducts a mark and a blank costs nothing. Our guide on improving VARC in three months covers the compressed version of that plan.

Why VARC Feels Harder in Memory Than It Was

There is a reason the harder-every-year impression is so widespread, and it has to do with how the section is experienced rather than how it is built.

VARC gives you almost no feedback while you sit it. In quant you generally know which questions you got; here you frequently do not, so you walk out with uncertainty rather than with a sense of a score. Uncertainty gets remembered as difficulty, because there is nothing else for it to be remembered as.

The section also concentrates its damage. One passage that went badly produces several wrong answers, and that single event is what the memory retains, while three passages that went fine leave no impression at all. So a section that was mostly successful can be remembered as a difficult one on the strength of ten minutes in the middle of it.

That is worth knowing before you contribute your own account to the annual discussion, and worth knowing when reading anyone else's.

The Answer

Has CAT VARC got harder over recent years? No reliable trend exists, and the question rests on treating difficulty as a property of a paper when it is a relationship between the paper and its readers.

What has changed is shape rather than severity. The overall paper size has moved, the internal composition has moved with it, and the type-in proportion has varied, which affects how forgiving the section is to attempt without changing how hard the passages are.

What has not changed is worth more to you: reading comprehension carries the majority, the prose leans toward argued humanities and social science writing, the claims are often implicit, and the competence rewarded is judgment rather than recall. Prepare for those, prepare across a range of difficulty, and let the year be whatever it turns out to be.

If your VARC results swing between mocks and you are attributing it to paper difficulty, that assumption is worth testing. A CAT preparation strategy review separates paper variance from your own, and a personalised CAT preparation plan can build the harder blocks into your fortnight.