Key Takeaways
- A single mock score is one noisy reading. No mock series publishes how wide its band is, so read five mocks together before calling anything a drop.
- A good first mock followed by lower ones is what luck alone often produces. Statisticians call it regression to the mean.
- Creators give four causes for swings. Each is a claim, and none was found tested on CAT mocks.
- Anxiety and working memory are linked in research, at a modest average strength. "Working memory shuts down first" says more than the research does.
- People mostly compare upward, and it mostly feels worse. A fixed rule for social media and Telegram is easier to keep than a feeling.
- This page is educational and is not medical advice. If worry about CAT is affecting your sleep, eating or daily life, please speak to a qualified professional.
A viewer put this question to a coaching platform's live Q&A in about July 2026.
"Scores have been consistently dipping. Had a good first mock and then just continues sliding down the uh slope." (a viewer in a coaching platform's live Q&A, about July 2026, video)
"I can solve at least 14 questions after the exam in QA, whereas I can only score in the 20s in the exam." (a post on r/CATpreparation, August 2026)
"It’s almost like I went from worrying about preparation to worrying about performance." (a post on r/CATpreparation, September 2026)
CAT (Common Admission Test) 2026 is on Sunday 29 November 2026, 61 days after this page was published. It has three 40-minute sections with no switching: VARC (Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension), DILR (Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning) and QA (Quantitative Ability). A mock is a regular reading on where you stand, and that reading moves around.
Two things get mixed up when a score drops: how much the number moves without anything changing, and what the number does to the person reading it. The number comes first. If questions you solved last week also look new again, the memory side of that is in why you forget what you study for CAT.
What aspirants describe
Four shapes recur in the posts read for this page. Locate yours.
- Sliding after a good first mock. The viewer's question above is the example.
- Flat at one number for weeks. A post on r/CATpreparation in September 2026 says "My mocks are stuck at 70-75 percentile." A question on Quora, with no date shown, asks "Why am I stuck at 70 percentile in CAT mocks?"
- Knowing it after the paper, losing it during the paper. The r/CATpreparation post above is one. Another viewer in the live Q&A said they could solve almost the entire section without a time limit, and got five right out of eight attempted under the timer.
- Total steady, sections swapping. A viewer in the live Q&A said: "my overall score range is very similar, but the components of the score are very different."
"i analyse each and every mock but still stuck" (a post on r/IIMCATPreparation, September 2026)
These are individual posts, and how common each shape is among aspirants is not known.
What a mock score contains
A percentile is a rank inside a group. The official CAT 2024 scaled score document, the most recent one this page could open, computes the average and spread of raw scores separately for the morning, afternoon and evening sessions, adjusts each candidate's score with those figures, and then takes percentile from rank among all candidates. Whatever the reason, the design treats a difference between sessions as something to correct for.
A mock is a different paper on a different platform. In the live Q&A, the host said he is closely involved in setting his platform's mocks, that a mock maker sometimes sets one section easier and another tougher, and that the difficulty of the mocks themselves varies. That is one person speaking about one platform. A percentile on a mock platform may be a rank among that platform's own takers or a prediction from past CAT data, and either way it is a different group from this year's CAT takers. The provider's help page says which. For how IIM cutoffs are stated against percentiles, see the CAT cutoff guide.
Test makers also publish how far a score can move with no change in the person. ETS, which runs the GRE, says small score differences may come from measurement error and not from real differences in ability. For GRE Verbal Reasoning, on a 130 to 170 scale, its tables give a standard error of measurement (the typical size of that error) of 3.17 points, and say two scores should differ by more than twice its 4.48 figure for score differences, about 9 points, before the gap is likely to be real at roughly 95 percent confidence. The GRE is a different exam, built and equated by a professional testing organisation, and no comparable figure was found for any CAT mock series. What carries over is that a band exists around every score, and for a mock its width is unknown.
A workable picture of one mock reading is your level, plus the paper, plus luck (which questions you happened to know, which set you happened to pick), plus the state you were in that day. Only the first is what you are trying to measure.
Regression to the mean
Regression to the mean can make natural variation in repeated readings look like real change. Barnett, van der Pols and Dobson describe it in the International Journal of Epidemiology: unusually large or small measurements tend to be followed by measurements closer to the mean. It becomes more noticeable as measurement error grows, and when follow-up is examined only for a subgroup chosen because of its first reading.
"My first mock was my best" fits that description. You picked the best of your readings after seeing all of them, and the later ones are compared against the peak.
Illustration, not data. The numbers below are invented to show the mechanism. Suppose ten aspirants all have exactly the same real level, 45 marks. On each mock, luck adds or subtracts a few marks, and luck on mock 2 is unrelated to luck on mock 1. The table shows the four highest and the four lowest on mock 1.
| Aspirant | Mock 1 | Mock 2 |
|---|---|---|
| A | 57 | 41 |
| B | 53 | 51 |
| C | 50 | 36 |
| D | 48 | 46 |
| G | 41 | 48 |
| H | 39 | 44 |
| I | 37 | 53 |
| J | 36 | 38 |
The four highest on mock 1 (A to D) average 52 and then 43.5, a fall of 8.5 marks. The four lowest (G to J) average about 38 and then about 46, a rise of 7.5 marks. Nobody's level changed, yet the top group looks like it lost ground and the bottom group looks like it improved.
The example shows what luck alone can do to a first reading that happens to be high. It cannot tell you whether your own fall is luck or real, and real falls exist. The five-mock checks below help separate the two.
Four explanations creators give
Coaching channels disagree about why scores swing.
| Explanation | Where it appears | What supports it |
|---|---|---|
| A first mock is taken without pressure, often on an easy paper | The host of a coaching platform's live Q&A, about July 2026, called this very common among aspirants | No study is given in the video. None was found for CAT mocks. |
| Papers differ in difficulty from mock to mock | The same host, on how mocks are set, and a commenter on r/CATpreparation in September 2026 who ranks mock series by difficulty | Consistent with the form-to-form variation above. Which way a given paper leans is not visible to you. |
| Working memory shuts down first under the timer | A Hindi mock-strategy video from a coaching platform, about 23 September 2026, which also says the cause is arousal and can be trained | No source is given in the video. See the next section. |
| Decision quality: which questions and sets you pick | A September 2026 video from a coaching platform sorts every question into wrong, unattempted and correct-but-slow. Another channel says VARC trouble is a decision problem. | Checkable in your own logs by comparing attempts and accuracy. |
The claims also disagree with one another. One channel's video of 23 September 2026 says the first four or five mocks are bad for everyone. Another channel, reading out a student's write-up, says first-mock scores are typically low and can more than triple. The Q&A host above says a first mock taken without pressure often does well. All three cannot be a rule, though each may describe someone's experience.
Anxiety and working memory
Working memory is the mental workspace where you hold numbers, compare options and track an argument. Two pieces of research bear on the claim.
Beilock and Carr's 2005 paper in Psychological Science reports that only individuals high in working memory capacity were harmed by performance pressure, and that the drop was limited to the maths problems with the highest demands on working memory. The result is narrower than "pressure breaks your memory": it depended on the person and on the task, in one study of maths problem solving. Which CAT questions load working memory most is not something the paper answers.
Moran's 2016 review in Psychological Bulletin pooled 177 samples with 22,061 individuals and found that self-reported anxiety is reliably related to poorer performance on measures of working memory capacity, with an average effect of g = −0.334. The abstract also says some studies found restricted working memory in anxiety and others did not. A link on average shows that a link exists. It does not show what happened in your last DILR set.
So a milder version of the video's claim has research behind it: anxiety can take some working-memory capacity, on average, as measured in research tasks. "Working memory shuts down first" is stronger than either source supports. The blank-moment note below is a way to look for it in your own records.
What to look at across five mocks
Keep one line per mock, with the same columns every time.
- Date, mock series and mock number
- Total, and the score, questions attempted and questions correct for each section
- The minute of any blank moment, the question you were on, and how often you checked the timer
- The one or two decisions that cost the most time, such as a set you picked
After five mocks in the same series, check these in order.
- Band. Write down the lowest, the highest and the middle total. A move smaller than the spread inside your own five is not yet a change. If your last five ran from 62 to 74 (illustrative numbers), a 66 tomorrow tells you nothing new.
- Blocks of five. Compare the middle total of one block of five with the next block. Two single mocks are a weaker comparison than two blocks.
- Attempts and accuracy. A score depends on how many questions you attempt and how many of those you get right. A drop with steady accuracy and fewer attempts points at hesitation or question choice. A drop with steady attempts and lower accuracy points at errors.
- Repeat errors. A topic or question type wrong in three or more of the five is a pattern. One-off errors are more likely noise.
- Section swaps. A total that stays in a range while the sections trade places is more likely a paper effect than a change in you.
- Blank moments. If they cluster at similar minutes, or right after timer checks, you have something specific to work on. If they do not cluster, do not build a story around one bad section.
- After-the-paper gap. Solve the questions you skipped, untimed. If you can solve most of them, the gap is in selection and timing more than in knowledge.
These checks come from reasoning about how the numbers behave, plus log habits several coaching channels recommend. They are suggestions and not research results. Mock frequency and stage-wise planning are in how to prepare for CAT without coaching.
The evening after a bad mock
Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, in Make It Stick, describe a practice test as an objective instrument for checking what you know against what you think you know. An instrument reading has a band around it, so the first job after a bad mock is to record it without reacting. These steps are suggestions.
- Write the number down first. Date, series, total, sections. Add nothing about yourself.
- Decide nothing about your plan tonight. Dropping a topic, buying a new series or cancelling next week's mock can all wait a day.
- Note any blank moments now. They are hardest to recall tomorrow.
- Set aside the questions you most want back. Three is enough. Keep the question and keep the solution separate, so you can attempt it again without reading the answer. How to build a log you will reopen is in the CAT error log you will reread.
- Book tomorrow's analysis. Creators quote very different times, from about one hour to three for a two-hour mock. Pick a fixed block and stop when it ends.
- Put the next mock in the calendar. A post in a CAT Facebook study group, date not shown, says "Lately, I just don't feel like attempting a full mock. It's not because I'm not studying." A booked date removes one decision.
- Sleep and eat as usual.
For using the remaining weeks after a rough mock, see the last 60 days revision system.
Comparing yourself with other aspirants
Festinger's 1954 paper in Human Relations opened with the proposal that people have a drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities. That is a theory, and a great deal has been tested since. Gerber, Wheeler and Suls pooled more than 60 years of studies in a 2018 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin. Offered an upward or a downward comparison target, and no threat, people showed a strong preference for upward. The dominant reaction was contrast, so an upward comparison left people rating their own ability lower. The authors note limits, including how few studies had no-comparison control groups.
Social media adds volume. A review by Verduyn and colleagues in Current Opinion in Psychology says social comparison on social networking sites typically has negative effects on wellbeing, as people tend to make contrasting upward comparisons. In an experiment by Vogel and colleagues, published in 2014, viewing a profile with upward comparison information lowered state self-esteem compared with a profile with downward information. These studies were not on exam candidates, and they measured wellbeing and self-esteem, not exam scores.
"and here after seeing others marks i literally overthink" (a post on r/IIMCATPreparation, September 2026)
"Reddit is filled with overachievers for some reason lmao with only 8s and 9s" (a comment on r/MBAIndia, September 2026)
Posts are chosen by the people who write them, so a feed is a selected sample. That is reasoning and not a measured figure.
A rule for social media and Telegram
A rule is easier to keep than a feeling. These are suggestions, based on the research above and not tested as a set.
- One window. Look at other people's scores in one fixed slot, after your own analysis for the day is written down. Never before a mock and never in the hour before sleep.
- One comparison that counts. Compare your middle total for the last five mocks with your middle total for the five before. Everyone else's number belongs to a different paper, a different platform and a different person.
- Three questions before a number gets any weight. Which mock, taken on which date, against which group of takers.
- Mute score-sharing threads and channels. Keep the ones that give you material. For what to keep from the PDFs those channels send, see what to keep from WhatsApp and Telegram PDFs.
- Log the trigger. If a post made you study less that day, write one line about it. A week of lines shows which sources to drop.
When worry is more than a study problem
Everything on this page is educational. It is not a diagnosis and it is not a treatment. Feeling nervous before an exam is an ordinary human reaction. If anxiety about CAT is affecting your sleep, your eating or your daily life, please speak to a qualified professional. In India, Tele-MANAS is the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare's mental health helpline. Its official page lists 14416, and its services page describes a free, 24/7 service in 20 languages, where a trained counsellor speaks with you and refers you on if appropriate. That page lists anxiety among the concerns it takes calls about.
Keeping the record where you will reopen it
This page is published by Rehearsal, so weigh this section accordingly. A notebook or a spreadsheet does everything in the checklists above, and if yours is working, keep using it.
Rehearsal is a capture-and-recall habit, not a coach. It does not score mocks, coach you, improve your results or predict your percentile, and it has no CAT mocks or question bank. It holds what you send it so you can find it again. You can record a voice note straight after a mock, saying in your own words what happened in the blank minutes, and the recording is kept with playback and a transcript. It also holds PDFs, screenshots and links, and forwarding selected files from WhatsApp and Telegram is live. The free plan includes recording, transcription and playback. On the Unlimited plan you can ask your own notes a question, such as "what did I say about the blank minutes in my last mock?", and the MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector lets ChatGPT and Claude search the same material.
For a CAT-specific comparison of where to keep mock notes, see the best app to organize CAT notes. Connector setup is at Rehearsal MCP.
Questions aspirants ask
Why did my CAT mock scores drop after a good first mock?
A first reading that was high by luck, a first paper that suited you, or later papers that differed can each produce that shape. Use the five-mock checks to see whether the drop sits inside your own band.
How many mocks before I can trust a trend?
No research-backed number was found. This page uses five in the same series as a minimum for reading a band, and blocks of five for reading a change. Creators quote other numbers, such as seven or eight mocks to get the hang of it, or 30 to 40 in total, and none cites a study.
Can anxiety really make me blank in a mock?
Research links anxiety with poorer working-memory performance on average. Whether that explains a blank in your mock is a separate question, and logging when blanks happen lets you check it. If the anxiety is heavy, speak to a qualified professional.
Should I stop taking mocks if they make me anxious?
Coaching channels differ on how many mocks to take, and none gives research behind its number. If mocks are affecting your sleep or daily life, speak to a qualified professional, since a schedule cannot settle that.
How do I stop comparing myself with other CAT aspirants?
Research suggests people mostly compare upward and feel worse about their ability afterwards, so willpower alone is a weak plan. Use the rule above.