Aspirants happy after belling all-new CAT

MUMBAI: While there were few surprises in store for those who appeared for Common Admission Test (CAT), on Sunday, students were largely happy with the way the examination went.

With a new paper format in place for CAT 2015, the management aspirants were expecting a few subjective but around one-third of all the questions turned out to be of that kind, said students. Students added that the emphasis was higher on reading comprehension in the verbal ability and reading comprehension (VA-RC) section.

In a departure from previous years, when the exam was conducted at a stretch for 170 minutes, this year the CAT paper was divided in three 60 minute sections. Students observed that they could do with some more time in quantitative analysis section, which was heavy on mathematical problems.

The presence of on-screen calculator during CAT, which is conducted online, benefited some, while for others it didn’t make much of a difference. “I mostly relied on the short-cut tricks of solving mathematical sums that I had learnt while preparing for the exam,” said Priyesh Patil, who appeared for the exam on Sunday.

The VA-RC section, according to students, had a different pattern. Much of the questions pertained to recently introduced reading comprehension part, while the regular synonym, antonym questions were missing. “Those who are not good at English language found VA-RC to be tougher,” observed Chhatrapal Bawankule, another aspirant.

However, questions in the data interpretation and logical reasoning section were ostensibly the most difficult to answer.

“The questions were difficult on account of the complex data given which required aspirants to commit more time to each set than what they would have initially planned. A good understanding of quantitative concepts would have come in handy in this section,” said Prashanth Nair, Mumbai director, TIME coaching centre.

“Overall, this test was largely similar to last year’s test in terms of difficulty level. Students who have attempted more than 70 out of total 100 questions, with 85 to 90% accuracy, can expect to score above 99 percentile easily,” said Allwin Agnel, chief executive officer of entrance exam preparation portal pagalguy.com.

This year, around 2.18 lakh students had registered for CAT, which holds the key for 19 Indian Institute of Managements (IIMS) and numerous other management institutes. The exam was conducted across 650 centres in 136 cities.

Unlike previous years, the exam was wrapped in a single day.