The CAT 2026 answer key lets you calculate your exact marks before the official result. Indian Institutes of Management publishes a provisional answer key together with each candidate’s response sheet; this calculator reads your response sheet, applies the official marking scheme automatically and ranks you live against every student who has checked their score here.

CAT 2026 marking scheme

Because of negative marking, every wrong answer costs you 4 marks compared with a correct one. The scorecard shows exactly how many marks negative marking took away and what your accuracy was in each section.

How the rank and expected cut-off are predicted

Your score is compared with every response sheet checked for CAT on this site — overall, category-wise, female, shift-wise. The expected cut-off comes from a merit simulation: seats from the official advertisement are filled in order of merit, open seats first and then reserved seats, with female reservation and the minimum qualifying marks applied. As more students check their marks, the prediction gets closer to the final merit.

What decides the CAT cut-off

• Number of vacancies in each category
• Number of candidates who appeared and the difficulty level of each shift
• Normalisation between shifts
• Minimum qualifying marks for each category
• Changes made in the final answer key after objections

Answer key objection

If you believe an answer in the provisional key is wrong, open the objection desk on your scorecard. Students discuss each question of each shift separately, one objection card collects support from everyone, and you can download a ready-made proof sheet to upload on the official Indian Institutes of Management objection portal before the deadline.