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CAT: An Insight
The Common Admission Test or CAT as it is popularly known, is a
multiple choice written exam designed to test a candidate’s ability
& aptitude, under a time constraint. Held by the IIMs, CAT has
now become the entrance examination for several other leading
institutes.
Held on the second Sunday of December, CAT has test venues spread
across the country thus ensuring participation from the country’s
best.
A Brief Overview
Knowledge, as it should be is the prerequisite for this
examination but its unique feature remains its unpredictability.
Although the examination details have outlined the course covered
as spread over 4 distinctive sections of Quantitative Aptitude (QA),
Data Interpretation (DI), Reading Comprehension (RC) & Verbal
Ability (VA) the actual paper need not have any preset pattern or
division of sections.
The other features, which require mention, are Negative Marking
& Adequate Competence across all sections. Though the actual
extent of negative marking remains undisclosed, it is an integral
part of evaluation. Adequate Competence across all sections requires
of a student to perform in all sections to a certain minimum level
& once again though under the purview of the evaluation
committee, section cutoffs must be catered to during preparation.
Individual Sectional Insight
Quantitative Ability (QA)
- The questions are designed to stress more on reasoning skills
of the candidates, rather than on their computational skills.
- The level of difficulty of this section is perceived to be
higher because the questions are not only lengthy to read but at
times require more effort in terms of understanding and solving.
Data Interpretation (DI)
- As the name suggests, this section presents data to the
candidate in forms such as caselets, pie diagrams, bar graphs, etc
and questions are set to evaluate the candidate’s skills at
analyzing the given information.
- Data Sufficiency questions in this section are based on basic
mathematics (at times Data Sufficiency is a part of the
Quantitative Ability section).
Reading Comprehension (RC)
- CAT usually has 6-8 passages in the RC section, with an
overall length of 4500-5500 words and about 50 questions to answer
in a span of about 30 minutes. However this too can vary according
to the level of difficulty of questions.
Verbal Ability (VA)
- This section explores your understanding of the English
Language and also tests you on Reasoning Skills.
- The questions in this section typically comprise sentence
correction, sentence sequencing , verbal reasoning etc.
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