C-DAC C-CAT

It is the entrance test for admission to C-DAC's Post Graduate Diploma programmes, part of C-DAC's Education & Training activity, which C-DAC says trains more than 5000 students a year through its own centres and a network of Authorised Training Centres across India and abroad.

The notice on the C-DAC site lists CCAT applications from 25 November to 29 December 2026, test-centre sittings on 9 and 10 January 2027, and the next PGCP batch commencing 24 February 2027. These are announced future dates, so verify them on the official site before planning.

Expect sections on English, reasoning and quantitative aptitude, plus computer fundamentals and programming. Treat the aptitude sections as speed tests and the programming section as a concepts test: pointers, arrays, control flow and output tracing of short code snippets are the usual sticking points.

The content is not exotic; the difficulty is time pressure and uneven preparation. Common failure modes are neglecting quantitative aptitude until the last weeks, misreading multi-step reasoning puzzles, and losing marks on code-tracing questions because of off-by-one loops or operator precedence rather than genuine gaps.

Start with quantitative aptitude and reasoning, since these improve slowly and need repetition. Add programming fundamentals in parallel, revising one language thoroughly rather than several superficially. Keep English comprehension as short daily reading. In the final month, switch to timed section tests and full mocks.

Take mocks under strict timing, then spend more time reviewing than attempting. Classify each error as concept gap, careless slip or time loss, and fix the largest category first. Track section-wise accuracy across mocks; a rising trend matters more than any single score.

The source material available here does not state a retake policy, number of attempts, score validity period, fee or qualifying cut-off. Those details are set by C-DAC and change between cycles, so check the current official C-CAT pages rather than relying on older information.

Use the language you can already write and read most fluently; the test checks fundamentals, not a specific language's library trivia. Be comfortable with variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, basic string handling and simple recursion, and practise predicting output by hand without a compiler.

The C-DAC website at cdac.in carries Education & Training notices, including CCAT dates and batch commencement. Note that the dedicated C-CAT page was not reachable when this material was retrieved, so navigate from the Education & Training section and confirm every date and eligibility rule there.