The changes announced for the Common Admission Test 2015 may make this edition of CAT appear to be significantly different from last year’s but in reality most of the changes are in the structure and will not affect a well prepared student at all. The point to be noted is that the kind of questions that will be asked has not changed.
Data Interpretation and logical Reasoning sections have been extracted from section 1 and section 2 respectively and have been combined to form it. Apart from anything else, it checks whether a student has equal competency in all the three sections or not. Freeing logical reasoning (lR) from verbal ability and logical reasoning (VAlR) section and data interpretation (DI) from the quantitative ability and data interpretation (QADI) section to create the new section means that the students good in mathematics can’t hide behind lR and will have to do well in reading comprehension (RC) and verbal to make it to the next stage. Similarly, those good in language can’t ignore DI or lR.
The correct strategy would be to not ignore any area and regularly practice all questions types. RC and DI which are routinely ignored will now become important and should be practiced daily. Contrary to the popular belief, the introduction of the sectional time limits will have positive effects on the test taking of the students. Due to the restriction of switching between the sections a student does not have to worry about the time management.
Students should take CAT 2015 as a string of 3 sectional tests of one hour each. Now a candidate should only be looking forward to maximise the number of attempts.
The non-MCQ questions should not be seen as a problem. The absence of choices might be inconvenient for some but whenever a new question type is introduced, the level of difficulty is low.
Although the calculations in CAT are never expected to be extremely difficult, a student should not refrain from using the calculator in times of dire need. Calculator might prove to be useful in DI questions with extremely close options. Students should analyse each and every mock and sectional test that they take. This will help them ascertain what worked or did not work for them. The analysis basically is about finding the questions that were easy but were not attempted and about realising why a particular question wasn’t answered correctly. All the difficult and important questions should be marked. These important questions should be revised once a week. The initial estimate for the score required for a 99 percentile this year is:
QA: Net score of 70-75 (23-25 attempts out of 34).
DIlR: Net score of 65-70 (22-24 attempts out of 32).
VRC: Net score of 55-60 (20-22 attempts out of 34).
Overall: Net score of around 175.
The writer is Gautam Puri, CAT expert & co-founder, Career launcher