Many students from Lucknow have secured over 99 percentile in the Common Admission Test (CAT)-2022, a gateway to the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The CAT-2022 results were declared on Wednesday.

Vaibhav Gupta, 24, scored 99.94 percentile in his latest attempt. After graduating from IIT-BHU, he cleared the exam in his third attempt. Having scored 95 percentile in Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension, 99.9 percentile in Quantitative Ability and 99.9 percentile in Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning, he is expecting calls from the top three B-Schools in India—IIM-Ahmedabad, IIM-Bengaluru and IIM-Calcutta.

However, he is yet to decide if he wants to take up a corporate job or become an entrepreneur after completing the two years of the post-graduate programme (PGP). Presently, he is working with a multinational company. “It was difficult to prepare for CAT while continuing in the job. But, I somehow managed,” he said.

Aditya Mishra, 22, scored 99.61 percentile in his second attempt. He is expecting calls from IIMs Lucknow and Kozhikode. He graduated from Shivaji College, Delhi University in 2022 in Bachelor in Business Economics (BBE) and took a job with a newly-established start-up in Canada. After two years of PGP, he wants to get into brand management. His father, Dev Sharma, is a retired government school teacher.

Akshay Mahajan, 25, cracked the CAT with 99.52 percentile. He cleared the exam in his third attempt and is expecting a call from IIM-Lucknow. He graduated from BITS Pilani in 2020. Presently, he has a work experience of two-and-half years with a data science firm. “I took mock exams every week to keep pace with time management,” he said. A day before his 21st birthday, Shivansh Nigam cracked CAT with 99.33 percentile. An ex-student of Lucknow University, Shivansh qualified the exam in his second attempt. “It is a dream come true as I always wanted to get into IIMs,” said Shivansh. After completing two years of PGP, he wants to take a corporate job and eventually start a venture of his own.

CAT-2022 was conducted on November 27.