CAT

Some people find 4-6 months and some 12 months, its depends. But certainly this is largely depends upon person to person.

Hi Hartej,
IIFT conducts its own entrance exam for its admission process. https://www.shiksha.com/university/indian-institute-of-foreign-trade/iift-exam.

Identify your strength and weaknesses. Make sure you practice more on your weaknesses more and also do not leave your strengths aside. You keep giving less hours on your strength and more hours on your weaknesses. Also keep on practising model papers and keep time yourself for each section as time is an important factor in CAT.

To get a good percentile in CAT, you need to score well in all the domains. So, I would suggest you to work hard in Maths. However you can get an average score if you aren't good in Maths. For MBA, you can easily perform well even if you are not so good in Maths.

CAT is the examination for colleges for India. For international studies you should give exams like GMAT for Management studies.

With availability of online resources now, this is not a tough task to prepare at home. One need to prepare a schedule and need to follow strictly.

LM Thapar is a good college in north India. I do not know the cut-offs.

For CAT topic: You must identify the section you can improve most in, it is worth the effort. If by Goa you mean Goa Institute of Management, we had 100% placement, the highest salary is of 22L, and average is of 10.5L.

To get a good MBA, colleges try for a 60+ score. But, there are colleges who take in candidates who scored around 50. so try aiming for more to get better colleges.
All the best.

If your attendance in not touching the criteria of 75% in each subject for the CAT 2 then you are going to be debarred in CAT 2 and if your overall attendance i.e. from July or August for 1 year, in each subject is not 75% then you get debarred in the ETE/semester examination and you need to pay 2300 as a debarred fee along with that you have to attend the debarred classes in the month of June.