What happened with the IMS mentor who claimed a perfect 204/204 CAT score?

A story that circulated widely among CAT aspirants involves an IMS mentor who claimed to have scored a perfect 204/204 in CAT — and the subsequent unraveling of that claim is worth understanding in full detail.

The background: this individual had reportedly scored 99.99 percentile in CAT the previous year and had deferred his IIM Ahmedabad admission. When he claimed a perfect 204/204 in the following year's attempt, IMS celebrated the achievement publicly — creating videos, posting across social media, and uploading a dedicated interview to their official YouTube channel, with Prasad Sawant as the interviewer.

The problem surfaced when IIM Calcutta announced official CAT results. The mentor's name did not appear on any topper's list. When IMS confronted him about the discrepancy, he confessed to fabricating his response sheet. His actual CAT score was allegedly 60 marks — projecting to approximately 90 percentile, a significant distance from the perfect score he had claimed. A second layer of deception then emerged: his previous year's 99.99 percentile was also allegedly fraudulent, reportedly achieved by copying responses from a friend seated beside him during the exam.

Following these revelations, IMS removed all celebratory videos and posts from their social media. They reportedly also mailed IIM Ahmedabad to inform them of the cheating, which would potentially lead to cancellation of his deferred admission. Several people who attended IMS centres have confirmed hearing about this incident directly from mentors there, and the removal of the YouTube interview video has been noted by multiple people who had originally seen it.

That said, a fair picture requires acknowledging the skepticism this story has also attracted. Several experienced voices have questioned the authenticity of the account, pointing to the absence of any official news coverage for what would have been a historically significant claim. One perspective we've seen raised repeatedly is worth noting: a perfect 204/204 would theoretically guarantee 100 percentile, making the original claim suspicious on its face — and raising the question of why a coaching institute with IMS's standing would publicize it without any verification process. The post, as it circulated, lacked independently verifiable sources, and that gap matters.

In our experience tracking how these stories move through aspirant communities, the details here are unusually specific — named individuals, named interviewers, specific score figures, institutional responses — which tends to give a story more credibility than vague accounts. At the same time, the absence of any mainstream coverage of something this consequential is a legitimate reason to hold the story with some caution.

What is not in dispute, regardless of the particulars of this case, is the broader lesson it surfaces: the pressure in India's CAT ecosystem is intense enough that fabrication at this level has been attempted before, and coaching institutes carry a real responsibility to verify claims before amplifying them to thousands of aspirants.