MBA seat aspirants looking to land a seat in one of the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) or other top B-schools using Common Admission Test (CAT) scores for admissions will have to watch out for a different CAT this year. The CAT 2014 will be conducted on two days, consisting of four sessions overall, in 99 cities comprising 354 test sites. The exams will be held on November 16 and 22.
One of the major changes is that the duration of the examination has been increased to 170 minutes from 140 minutes. In addition, questions in each section — Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation, and Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning — have been increased to 50 from 30.
Belvi Srinivas, Course Director, CAT, T.I.M.E. Bangalore, said there are three major changes in CAT-14: increased test duration, increased number of questions, and flexibility to switch between the sessions throughout the testing period. Apart from these, there are quite a few test administration changes.
Mr. Srinivas said most CAT-14 test takers have not only started their preparation a few months ago but have also made study plans to suit their test strategies, taking cues from the format and pattern of the last two to three years of CAT, which now needs re-planning. “However, students got an extra month to practice and prepare for CAT-14 as it is now held in mid-November instead of mid-October.”
Explaining the changes in the test pattern, he said the primary objective of increasing the test duration by 30 minutes could be to provide extended time to students to demonstrate their problem- solving skills. “But it throws up newer challenges to the candidate. Now one has to endure test pressure for 170 minutes against 140 minutes of the last few years. Also, it is difficult to concentrate and stay focussed without a break for such a long period of time unless practised,” he elaborated.
About increasing the number of questions by 67 per cent this year to 100 questions, he said it could be to test the breadth and depth of the knowledge of the test taker and to mitigate the huge variations in percentile scores a single question used to bring about in a 30 questions per section test of yesteryear.
More student friendly“With increased number of questions, one can expect proportionally more number of easy questions. The test is going to be more student friendly and students are expected to score better; yet one may not be able to obtain the desired percentile unless one is capable of solving good number of challenging questions. It is also a measure of one’s selection skills as one may not be able to solve all the questions in the test in the given time. Lack of selection skills might lead to reduced scores by missing scoring opportunities.
This is seen when candidates do not attempt easy questions spread across the test. With no clarity on distribution of questions by areas within each section, one has to prepare equally well in each testing area. Hence, selective preparation based on last year’s weightages allocated to areas of testing might turn out to be disastrous,” he cautioned.
The flexibility to switch between the two sections is touted to allow seat aspirants to spend more time either in their weaker section to clear the section cut-off score or in their stronger section to clear overall cut-off scores. For this, time management between the sessions and time discipline to stick to the plan or strategy are critical, experts say.
