| Monday, November 19, 2007
CAT throws up no big surprises, aspirants are a pleased lot
Some students found the quantitative ability section challenging
CHENNAI: Aspirants of management studies, who took the Common
Admission Test (CAT) here on Sunday, seemed fairly pleased with
the paper, as it had no big surprises. As many as 10,700 students
took the examination in the city, a significant rise from about
7,400 in 2005 and 9,000 last year.
On Sunday, nearly 2.30 lakh candidates took the test at 23 cities
across the country. The result of the test would determine their
prospect of getting into the most reputed business schools in
the country, including the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM).
Last year, nearly 1.90 lakh candidates appeared.
This year, the question paper had a total of 75 questions, as
was in last year’s edition of the test. There were three
sections — Verbal skills, Quantitative ability, and Data
interpretation and Logical reasoning — with 25 questions
each. Every question carried 4 marks with a penalty of one mark
for a wrong answer.
‘Data interpretation easy’
“I found the data interpretation section easy.
The verbal section was slightly difficult and quants (as most
students call the quantitative ability section), I always find
it very challenging,” said Divya Chadha, a student of
D.G.Vaishnav College, who took the test at Loyola College.
B. Karthik, who works for an IT major, said the data interpretation
and logical reasoning were the easiest parts.
Vignesh Girishankar, another IT professional, said the data
interpretation section involved more calculation when compared
to previous editions.
“The verbal section was tougher than last time,”
he said.
S.Balasubramanian, director of the Chennai Centre of Triumphant
Institute of Management Education (T.I.M.E), which trains students
for various competitive examinations, said this year’s
CAT was a reminder to students that not going through several
previous years’ question paper patterns was not a wise
thing to do.
There were about four questions on data sufficiency in the data
interpretation section. “CAT has not had questions such
as these in the last five to six years,” he said.
According to him, the quantitative ability section was considerably
tougher when compared to last year. The difficultly level of
the verbal ability section was largely similar to last year’s.
C.P. Narayanan, Adyar centre head of Career Launcher, which
also trains students for competitive examinations, said some
of the candidates found the verbal ability section dicey.
Mr.Balasubramanian said the initial estimate of cut off marks
for a possible interview call from one of the IIMs were 20 in
quantitative ability, 18 in verbal ability and 32 in data interpretation.
“We expect the overall cut off to fall between 88 and
92.”
Courtesy: The Hindu
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