A practical workspace for CAT preparation

Almost every CAT aspirant hits the same three questions and has no reliable way to answer them: what should I study today, did last month's work actually stick, and why has my mock score stopped moving? Those are not motivation problems. They are information problems, and they are solvable with a fairly small amount of record-keeping.

Most existing tools answer a different question. They count hours, which is easy to measure and almost useless on its own — two hours of re-reading a solved chapter and two hours of timed DILR sets are not the same preparation. My CAT Prep is built around what changes a score instead: which topic you touched, how accurate you were, what you have started to forget, and which mock decisions cost you marks.

The tracker connects daily planning, completed sessions, topic status across QA, VARC and DILR, mock analysis, spaced revision, and weekly review into one loop. In practice that means:

• Plan one thing. A section, a topic, and a time target for today rather than an aspirational weekly grid.
• Log what happened. A timer or a manual entry tied to a real topic, so effort accumulates against the syllabus.
• Analyse mocks properly. Attempts and correct answers per section, which is what separates “I need to study more” from “I am attempting too many questions in QA”.
• Revise before you forget. Revisit studied topics through the revision queue and record recall evidence to inform future recommendations.
• Review weekly. Section balance, active days, and trends, so next week's plan comes from evidence.

Being clear about the boundaries matters more than listing features. My CAT Prep does not provide coaching, teach concepts, supply practice questions or mock papers, or predict your percentile. It will not tell you which IIM you can expect a call from.

It is a layer on top of whatever material you already use. You still need reliable content and real mocks; this makes the decisions around them visible. Percentile prediction in particular is something we avoid on principle — percentiles depend on the entire cohort in a given year, so any confident prediction from a study tracker would be invented.

V2 saves your study evidence and history to your account in a server-side database. Google sign-in is managed by Clerk. Previous browser-only tracker data can be downloaded from /app on the same browser and device; it is not automatically imported into v2.

Limited visit and interaction analytics are used to understand which features get used, and the details are in the privacy policy. Study evidence is stored to power your plan; free-text study notes are not sent as marketing analytics parameters.

The preparation guides focus on repeatable planning, deliberate practice, review quality, and adapting a schedule from evidence. They avoid guaranteed outcomes, invented success stories, and the pretence that one timetable suits every aspirant.

Structural facts about the exam — three sections, 40 minutes each, +3/−1 marking — have been stable for years and are stated plainly, with the caveat that question counts have shifted slightly between years. Exam dates and process details are labelled tentative until the official notification confirms them. Where a number matters, verify it at iimcat.ac.in rather than trusting any third-party site, including this one.

The 30 topic groups used throughout the tracker are a practical checklist drawn from recurring concepts and question types, not an official syllabus. CAT does not publish a chapter list, groupings differ across books and coaching resources, and you can add custom topics when your material is organised differently.

My CAT Prep is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Indian Institutes of Management or the official CAT examination authority. It does not sell coaching, take affiliate commissions on course referrals, or accept payment for placement in its guides.