As discussions around CAT 2025 increasingly point to changing paper patterns and the growing presence of non-engineers among top percentile scorers, an unusual group continues to quietly walk into CAT exam centres every year — not as aspirants, but as educators.
Across India’s CAT coaching ecosystem, several faculty members who train thousands of aspirants annually continue to register for and take the Common Admission Test (CAT) themselves. They are not chasing IIM admission letters or MBA seats. Instead, the exam serves as a diagnostic tool — a way to decode shifting trends, test classroom strategies, and experience, first-hand, the pressures their students face.
For these tutors, CAT is no longer just an entrance test; it is part of their professional practice.
“Would you eat food at a restaurant where the chef did not himself taste the food?” said Hriday GS, CAT educator, who is the director (Academics) at AnkGanit Solutions Pvt Ltd, and has been teaching for the exam for nearly a decade. “Similarly, we are qualified to give advice on CAT and test-taking only if we undergo the process ourselves.”
The educator, now 39, has written the CAT 12 times since he began teaching in 2015. A colleague, he adds, has taken the exam 21 times. The motivation, he says, is not performance but proximity — to the exam, the pressure, and the student experience.
CAT has undergone subtle but significant changes over the years — from question framing and section-level difficulty to time management demands and surprise elements. While mock tests and memory-based analysis offer insights, many educators argue that nothing replaces sitting the exam in real conditions.
“Every year, there are small changes that don’t show up clearly in post-exam analysis,” says a senior CAT faculty member who has been taking the exam for over a decade.
“The pressure of the timer, the sequencing of questions, the mental fatigue — these are things you can only fully understand when you are in the exam hall,” the faculty added.
By taking CAT themselves, educators say they are better equipped to recalibrate preparation strategies, especially for students from non-engineering or humanities backgrounds, who often approach the exam differently.
The presence of non-engineers among top CAT percentilers in recent years has also pushed educators to reassess long-held assumptions about aptitude, speed, and strategy. Faculty members who appear for the exam often use their own performance as a benchmark to test whether popular preparation narratives still hold.
Several educators admit that taking CAT keeps them honest.
“It’s easy to over-simplify advice in a classroom,” says another faculty member. “When you take the exam yourself and struggle with a section or run out of time, you rethink how you teach that concept.”
This self-testing approach has become especially relevant as CAT questions increasingly focus on logic, interpretation, and decision-making rather than formula-heavy problem-solving alone.
In a crowded coaching market, appearing for CAT has also become a credibility exercise — though most educators downplay this aspect. Students increasingly expect faculty to be deeply familiar with the latest exam pattern, and some coaching institutes even encourage teachers to take CAT as part of internal academic review.
However, educators insist the motivation is less about marketing and more about pedagogy.
“Students can sense when advice is second-hand,” says a faculty member from Guwahati Assam, who teaches Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension. “When you’ve faced the paper yourself, your feedback becomes more precise and practical.”
That philosophy is echoed by Sony Goyal, a CAT educator who recently shared that he took the exam for the 17th time, scoring 99.36 percentile in CAT 2025, following a 99.99 percentile in CAT 2024. It marked his 17th attempt with a 99-plus score.
Goyal says he continues to appear for CAT each year to remain a learner first. According to him, the exam evolves constantly — with shifting challenges, new traps, and increasing emphasis on mindset — and experiencing these changes first-hand helps him guide students with greater clarity.
Balancing CAT preparation alongside professional responsibilities, he notes, is rarely easy. Time constraints, mental fatigue, and demanding schedules are part of the process, but returning to the exam year after year helps him stay connected to what aspirants actually face.
For Goyal, CAT functions less as an entrance test and more as a professional benchmark — a way to ensure that the guidance he offers remains current, practical, and tested under real exam conditions. He also stresses that consistency and long-term commitment matter more than isolated success, both for educators and aspirants.
A similar trajectory is seen in the career of Renjith Thomas Joshua, a Thiruvananthapuram-based CAT educator who has been writing the exam for over a decade and has secured a 100 percentile multiple times. Joshua first took the CAT in 2009 while completing his engineering degree at the College of Engineering Trivandrum and later worked briefly as a business analyst in Bengaluru. He also began teaching aptitude and CAT preparation alongside his professional roles. Over time, he realised that mentoring students and engaging with the exam appealed to him more than a conventional corporate career, prompting him to step away from salaried roles and set up his own CAT coaching institute in Thiruvananthapuram. He continues to take the CAT often to stay attuned to evolving patterns and classroom realities.
Interestingly, many educators say taking CAT without the pressure of admission does not necessarily make the exam easier. In some cases, it introduces a different kind of stress — the expectation to perform well despite years away from formal test-taking.
“There’s an added pressure of self-image,” one educator notes. “You’re teaching this exam every day. If you find it difficult, it forces introspection.”
Some admit they deliberately avoid checking percentiles, focusing instead on section-wise experience, question selection, and time allocation — insights they later share with students.
For educators, the biggest takeaway from taking CAT each year is empathy. Sitting in the exam hall reminds them of the anxiety, uncertainty, and mental exhaustion students experience — especially first-time test-takers.
That awareness often translates into changes in classroom tone, mock test feedback, and counselling sessions during the high-pressure months leading up to CAT.
“Appearing for CAT keeps us grounded,” says one faculty member. “It reminds us that behind every percentile is a person dealing with pressure.”
Since 2022, the AnkGanit mentors have been teaching students the 4x4x4 breathing technique which helps them remain calm during the intense high pressure of the exam. “The same technique is used by special forces such as the US Navy Seals during the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Further, many students suffer from insomnia the last few days before CAT. So we teach some custom breathing exercises based on yogic techniques which help regain sleep. Sometimes it is not as much about concepts as about helping ease the process,” they said.
As CAT continues to evolve and diversify its top scorers, these educator-candidates form a rare bridge between theory and experience — proving that sometimes, the best way to teach an exam is to keep taking it.