IPM Aptitude Test (IPMAT), IIM Indore(IPMAT Indore)

About the exam

About IPMAT Indore

IIM Indore computed an Aptitude Test Score for 838 of the 17,916 candidates who scored at least 1 in all three sections of IPMAT Indore in 2026, and it published both figures itself in a summarised disclosure under the Right to Information Act for the IPM 2026-31 batch. The institute names the test the IPM AT in its own documents. It runs once a year, and the rules binding any one cycle sit in the admission procedure IIM Indore releases for that batch.

For domestic applicants, the admission procedure for the IPM 2026-31 batch selects candidates on overall performance in the Aptitude Test and a Personal Interview, and a candidate who fails to appear for either is not considered at all. The final category-wise merit list runs on a Composite Score that weights the Aptitude Test Score 65 and the Personal Interview 35.

That makes the paper one half of a two-part decision, and the half that decides who gets to sit the other half. IIM Indore releases a separate admission procedure for international applicants, linked from the same IPM admissions page.

At a glance

IPMAT Indore highlights

Calendar

Important dates

IIM Indore publishes a tentative schedule for the cycle in its IPM FAQs, then moves the real dates through announcements on the admissions page. The 2026-31 batch was planned to this timetable.

The application window then moved. IIM Indore extended submissions to 5:00 PM on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, and afterwards opened a short edit window from 10:00 am on Monday, March 23, 2026 to 5:00 pm on Tuesday, March 24, 2026 (IPM admissions page). The exam date itself was fixed far earlier: an announcement dated October 8, 2025 set IPM AT 2026 for Monday, May 04, 2026 in the afternoon shift (IPM admissions page).

IIM Indore's own note under that timetable calls it tentative and tells candidates to check the admissions page for the actual schedule of a particular academic year (IPM FAQs).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Age is the criterion that disqualifies quietly, because it is pinned to a date rather than to a class. For the IPM 2026-31 batch a candidate had to be born on or after August 01, 2006, with five years of relaxation for SC, ST and PwD candidates, so born on or after August 01, 2001 (admission procedure).

On schooling, the same document required a pass in Standard X or SSC, and a pass in Standard XII or HSC in 2024 or 2025, or an appearance in 2026. Candidates likely to complete Standard XII by the end of July 31, 2026 could also apply, and would be admitted provisionally: at registration they had to produce both mark sheets with a school leaving or migration certificate, or the offer stood cancelled (admission procedure).

Percentage is worked out on the aggregate marks of all subjects appearing on the mark sheet, whatever the board's own regulation says, and letter grades are converted by the method the awarding board itself certifies. That document sets no minimum percentage for either class, while reserving to IIM Indore the right to decide eligibility in terms of equivalence, percentage of marks, recognition of the qualifying examination and intake. Applicants from schools affiliated to IGCSE and IB, the latter for IBDP and IBCP participants only, may apply and are asked to produce the IB Indian Percentage Transcript (admission procedure).

Step by step

Application process and fee

Applications for the 2026-31 batch were online only, through www.iimidr.ac.in, from Monday, February 02, 2026, when the link went live, to Saturday, March 14, 2026. The fee was payable online and was neither refundable nor transferable (admission procedure).

Category is locked at submission. The admission procedure states that no change of category is entertained once the application has been submitted, that NC-OBC, SC, ST and PwD applicants must produce a valid category certificate, and that EWS applicants must produce a valid document establishing their eligibility. It also warns that anyone filing more than one application with minor changes of information or fact is summarily rejected and debarred from the rest of the selection process (admission procedure).

After the window shut, IIM Indore allowed one pass over six fields and no others: photograph, signature, alternate mobile number, alternate email address, exam centre city preferences and interview city preferences. The edit was optional, usable once, and closed for good on submission (IPM admissions page).

Before the exam

Admit card and exam day

The admit card for IPM AT 2026 was released on 21 April 2026, and the announcement carrying it also stated the paper would run 120 minutes (IPM admissions page).

Reporting ran on a hard clock. Candidates were let into the test centre from 12:00 PM and nobody was allowed to report after 1:30 PM, with priority entry for PwD candidates (IPM admissions page), for a paper scheduled from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM (admission procedure). The institute advised candidates to locate the centre and check how reachable it was at least a day before the test.

Structure

Exam pattern

The admission procedure for the 2026-31 batch names three sections in the Aptitude Test: Quantitative Ability (MCQ), Quantitative Ability (Short Answer) and Verbal Ability (MCQ). Each question carries 4 marks, a wrong answer costs 1 mark everywhere except the Short Answer section, and each section has its own clock (admission procedure).

Two rules that sit outside the table matter as much as what is in it. Candidates must answer the sections in a pre-specified order that is the same for everyone, and IIM Indore states plainly that the order in which it lists the sections is not the order in which they appear (admission procedure).

The three sections also do not weigh equally in the score that decides a shortlist. The Aptitude Test Score weights Quantitative Ability (MCQ) at 25, Quantitative Ability (SA) at 25 and Verbal Ability at 50, and each section's contribution is scaled against the highest and lowest scores the eligible pool obtained in that section (admission procedure).

What to study

Syllabus

Neither the admission procedure for the 2026-31 batch nor the IPM FAQs published alongside it carries a topic-wise syllabus. What the admission procedure sets out is the section structure, the marking and the time per section (admission procedure).

One level up, the IPM programme page gives scope a single sentence: the entrance examination examines an applicant's aptitude and logical reasoning, and their proficiency in English and in Mathematics (IPM programme page).

How to prepare

Preparation and books

Start from the constraints the paper itself imposes. Each section is given 40 minutes of its own and the sections must be attempted in a fixed order, so a candidate meets them one at a time and in an order the admission procedure itself does not disclose (admission procedure).

Marking pulls the two Quantitative Ability sections in different directions. A wrong multiple-choice answer costs 1 mark; the Short Answer section carries no negative marking at all (admission procedure).

Verbal Ability is worth attention twice over. It carries the heaviest weight in the Aptitude Test Score at 50 against 25 for each Quantitative Ability section (admission procedure), and in IPM AT 2026 its minimum cut-off mark was the highest of the three sections in every single category, from 30 for PwD candidates to 111 for the General category (RTI disclosure).

Neither the admission procedure nor the IPM FAQs for the 2026-31 batch recommends any book, course or practice material (IPM FAQs).

Where it is held

Exam centres

The Aptitude Test is a centre-based paper and IIM Indore fixes the city list per cycle. For IPM AT 2026 it named 39 cities, tentatively: Agra, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh or Mohali, Chennai, Dehradun, Delhi, Ernakulam (Kochi), Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurugram, Guwahati, Gwalior, Hyderabad, Indore, Jabalpur, Jaipur, Kolkata, Kozhikode, Lucknow, Meerut, Mumbai, Nagpur, Noida, Patiala, Patna, Pune, Raipur, Ranchi, Roorkee, Siliguri, Thiruvananthapuram, Udaipur, Ujjain, Varanasi and Visakhapatnam. The institute reserved the right to change the cities or centres, or cancel a centre, at any time the situation warranted (admission procedure).

Centre choice is a form field, and it is not the only city a candidate names. Exam centre city preferences and interview city preferences are two separate entries on the application (IPM admissions page).

After the exam

Answer key

IIM Indore posted no answer key for IPM AT 2026 on its IPM admissions page. What it announced there was an objection window, from 10:00 am on Monday, May 11, 2026 to 5:00 pm on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, reached through a candidate login rather than a public download (IPM admissions page).

The outcome was announced in public. On May 21, 2026 the institute said subject matter experts for the Verbal Ability and Quantitative Ability sections had reviewed the objections, determined that none were valid, and left the answer key for IPM AT 2026 unchanged (IPM admissions page).

Scores

Result and scorecard

Results reach candidates one at a time, not as a published list. IIM Indore puts the provisional shortlist for the Personal Interview and the provisional admission status behind personal lookups, each asking for the 9 digit application form number together with either the registered email ID or the date of birth (provisional shortlist, IPM 2026-31 batch, provisional admission status, IPM 2026-31 batch).

Silence is itself a result, and the admission procedure says so twice: individual regret letters are not sent to applicants rejected at the eligible-pool stage, and no intimation is sent to candidates who are not selected for the final offer (admission procedure).

An Aptitude Test Score is not computed for everyone who sits the paper. For IPM AT 2026 it was calculated only for the 838 candidates who met the sectional cut-off marks (RTI disclosure).

Scores you need

Cutoff

IIM Indore's admission procedure sets no single qualifying score. It fixes a minimum mark in each of the three sections, decided by the Admissions Committee and varying by category, and applies those minimums only to candidates who first posted a positive raw score in all three sections (admission procedure).

For IPM AT 2026, 17,916 candidates cleared that first bar with a raw score of 1 or more in every section, and the institute's summarised RTI disclosure for the IPM 2026-31 batch records the sectional minimums it then applied.

Those 838 candidates are the only ones who received an Aptitude Test Score, and the spread inside each category is wide.

Read both tables as history rather than as a target. The admission procedure leaves the sectional minimum to the Admissions Committee for each cycle, and the Aptitude Test Score is scaled against the pool that sat that particular paper (admission procedure).

Getting a seat

Counselling and seat allotment

Seat allotment here is one institute's own arithmetic, and no common counselling authority appears anywhere in IIM Indore's admission procedure. The institute builds a category-wise merit list on the Composite Score, 65 from the Aptitude Test Score and 35 from the Personal Interview, and makes provisional admission offers against that list while adhering to Government of India reservation norms (admission procedure).

Those norms are shares of a small intake. The same document puts the sanctioned intake for the IPM 2026 batch, domestic applicants, at 150, and reserves 27 percent of seats for NC-OBC candidates, 15 percent for SC, 7.5 percent for ST, up to 10 percent for EWS and 5 percent for PwD candidates, with benchmark disability defined as not less than 40 percent of a specified disability under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (admission procedure).

Declining an offer has a deadline and a price. A candidate withdrawing from the 2026-31 batch had to raise the request through the student portal by July 31, 2026; Rs. 1,000 was then deducted as a processing fee under the ministry notification the institute cites, and the balance released to the candidate's bank account within one month (withdrawal procedure).

Where it is accepted

Participating institutes

The IPM AT admits to exactly one programme, IIM Indore's own five-year IPM, on the terms the admission procedure sets for that batch (admission procedure).

The score travels further than the programme does, and always into somebody else's. IIM Indore's admissions page names the institutions that would use IPM AT 2026 scores for admission to programmes of their own: IIM Sirmaur, IIM Sambalpur, IIM Ranchi, IIM Amritsar and IIM Shillong, the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Alliance University, GLS University, the Institute of Management at Nirma University, LM Thapar School of Management at TIET, the IFMR Graduate School of Business at Krea University, and the Department of Management Studies at NALSAR University of Law. For each of them the page gives an address, a phone number and an admissions email rather than a process (IPM admissions page).

Get help

Contact

IPM admission queries go to the Admissions Office, Indian Institute of Management Indore, Rau-Pithampur Road, Indore 453556, Madhya Pradesh, on 0731-2439685 or 0731-2439687, or by email to ipmadmissions@iimidr.ac.in (admission procedure).

Through the 2026 cycle the institute also ran a helpdesk number, +919513167688, on the IPM admissions page (IPM admissions page). Any dispute concerning admission to the 2026-31 batch is subject to the jurisdiction of the competent courts of Indore (admission procedure).

Source

Official links

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Exact dates, total marks, question count, cutoffs, fees, seat counts, answer keys and results are per-cycle. Eligibility DOB cut-off is cycle-specific. Anything per-cycle here is stated for the cycle it names and is taken from the conducting body's own notification; confirm it on the official website before acting on it. Expertie does not conduct any exam, process applications or charge fees.

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