CAT was moderate this year: Students

Students found the Common Admission Test (CAT), the national-level management entrance examination, held on Sunday by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) across 140 cities on Sunday, to be moderate in terms of the level of difficulty.

As per CAT exam analysis 2017, the test was easier compared to last year. The pattern of the forenoon slot of CAT 2017 was very much on the lines of CAT 2016. The number of questions across sections remained the same as that of last year. Candidates who appeared for the exam talked about a ‘tough’ Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DI LR).

The security check at entry point was very rigorous at most centers. Belts, clips, jewellery including rings, earrings, chains etc. were not allowed. Many were forced to deposit such items outside and only then were they allowed to step into the examination hall.

The exam started with Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension section which had 34 questions. This was followed by the Logical Reasoning and Data Interpretation section which had 32 questions. The last section was Quantitative Ability which had 34 questions.

There were 24 questions in reading comprehension and 10 in verbal. Aspirants were delighted to find the reading comprehension easy both in terms of language and the subject area. There were three passages with 6 questions each and two, with three each. The relative ease of reading the passages was compensated by the increased level of difficulty in the choices.

Mr Ramnath Kanakadandi, CAT expert, said, ‘’A relatively high proportion of questions from this area were inferencebased, requiring good critical reasoning skills. The options in most questions were close and would have involved reading and sometimes, multiple reading of the relevant portions of the passage.”

He said the 10 questions on verbal ability were of moderate level of difficulty. With seven of these 10 being non-multiple choice type questions, the effective level of difficulty would appear to be higher by a notch or two. The cutoff in this section is expected to be slightly lower than that in CAT 2016’’.

The logical reasoning and data interpretation section of CAT 2016 was considered by many to be the most difficult, CAT 2017 exceeded even that level. The entire section comprised difficult and ‘very difficult’ level questions.

The entire section had DI- and Quant-based reasoning sets, making it almost impossible to identify and classify them separately. Other sets were outright intimidating even at first glance, given the volume of data and text.