Clearing CAT With Over 99 Percentile Is Not Enough And No One Tells You Why
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-05-03 06:50:00
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
A seat at one of the Indian Institutes of Management, particularly the top-tier campuses such as Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai, Kozhikode or Lucknow, remains a coveted goal for lakhs of aspirants each year. The rising number of candidates taking the Common Admission Test (CAT) reflects this growing aspiration. Last year alone, around 2.95 lakh candidates registered for the exam, of whom approximately 2.58 lakh appeared, competing for barely 8,425 seats across IIMs. For many, clearing a high percentile is seen as a decisive milestone. In such a brutally competitive environment, even marginal shortfalls can have outsized consequences. It is therefore understandable when a candidate feels aggrieved after missing out on an interview call despite crossing the overall cut-off.
This was precisely the situation faced by a candidate from near Hyderabad who secured an impressive 99.52 percentile in CAT and expected a call from the Indian Institute of Management Mumbai. However, despite clearing the overall threshold, he was not shortlisted. The reason, unknown to him initially, was that he had failed to meet the sectional cut-off in Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning, where the institute required 93.5 percentile and he had scored 92.87.
Given the intense competition and the sheer number of high scorers, IIMs routinely apply sectional cut-offs to refine their shortlist. Clearing the overall percentile is only one part of a multi-layered filtering process. Yet, in this case, the lack of clarity around this criterion became the core of the dispute.
The candidate approached the Telangana High Court, alleging that the denial of an interview call despite clearing the cut-off was arbitrary and discriminatory. The court, however, upheld the instituteâs position. It ruled that clearing an overall cut-off does not create any enforceable right to an interview call, and that candidates must satisfy all sectional requirements as well. The judgment also reaffirmed a well-settled principle: academic institutions have the autonomy to determine admission criteria, and judicial intervention is unwarranted unless such criteria are illegal or mala fide.
Legally, the ruling is sound. But the episode exposes a more avoidable and troubling lapse: silence.
The candidate had reportedly sought clarification from the institute via email but received no response. A simple explanation that he had missed the sectional cut-off would have resolved the issue at the outset. Instead, the absence of communication pushed the matter into the courts, consuming time and resources that neither the candidate nor the judiciary could afford.
What stands out here is not the rejection, but the lack of accountability in communication. Institutions of national importance cannot afford to operate with opacity, especially in processes that significantly impact the lives and careers of young aspirants.
In an ecosystem where candidates invest years of preparation, financial resources, and emotional energy, transparency is not a courtesy, it is a responsibility. A brief response from the Indian Institute of Management Mumbai could have prevented unnecessary litigation. That it did not reflect a systemic indifference that deserves scrutiny.
For elite institutions, credibility rests not only on academic excellence but also on administrative responsiveness. In this case, the law may have settled the dispute, but better communication could have avoided it altogether.
