CL Vice Chairman, Mr. Gautam Puri on CAT so far

Is there a noticeable pattern that you have observed in the past few days?

If you look at the paper, the pattern has not changed at all. By enlarge students are reporting that it is still a 60 questions paper, distributed equally between three sections – English, RC, Quant and DI. The level of questions also seems to be the same as reported by them. Even in English, the same kind of questions and similar number of passages are appearing. So, from a pattern point of view there doesn’t seem to be any change in the paper. What also has not changed is the fact that many students are reporting that they are encountering questions that have been picked up from previous year CAT papers. An interesting thing observed by many students is that it seems to be a situation where same questions are asked in different time slots, both in Quant. as well as DI, and in a couple of cases even in English. So, things haven’t changed much since day 1 and I would say that they are likely to continue in this manner.

What is your prediction for the coming days?

I don’t foresee any change in pattern of tests, also, since these questions were already set in advance, and if any change was to happen, it would have set in by now. Just go ahead and relax in the paper and assume it will be similar to the previous ones.

Your advice to students whose exams have been rescheduled?

I would say they are in fact the fortunate ones. Now they know what the pattern is and can be better prepared for the paper. So, now that you know what the pattern is going to be and have an idea about the questions (if you were fortunate enough) and paper, go ahead and start preparing. Don’t let this worry you at all, good for you that it got cancelled.

How should the students prepare, who are yet to sit for the CAT?

Those whose dates are yet to come in terms of taking the paper, I would say go onto www.careerlauncher.com , TestGym and do lots of online practice. Second, based on student feedback, since you know there is a likelihood of previous year’s questions coming, it would be prudent on your part to prepare for them, whether they actually do appear or not. Remember, RC is not very lengthy and because you know that the pattern is a little easy with respect to English and a little more difficult when it comes to DI, your time allocation would have to be done accordingly.

What can be bracketed as a good attempt?

Again, this will be based on student feedback of past few days. In English, you can comfortably attempt about 13-15 questions. You will probably not be able to go beyond 16 because when it comes to questions like para-completion and grammar, you may not be sure of the answer and hence should be leaving it. Similarly, in RC, you may not be sure of some answers and you should move on over them.

Coming to Quantitative section, student feedback indicates that if you spend 45 minutes on this section, you should be able to attend to 13 questions comfortable, on the outside about 15 questions.

The seemingly difficult section is Data Interpretation, and there also the feedback is that the Data Interpretation part is easy and the Reasoning part is difficult and tricky. So if you split the section into DI and Reasoning which is 50-50, out of DI you will probably be able to do maybe about 6-7 questions and another 4-5 questions in the reasoning portion, which will give you a cumulative of 11-12 for Data Interpretation and Reasoning.

So, to summarize:

English, 40 minutes about 15 questions.

QuanitativeAptitude 45 minutes, about 13-14 questions.

Data Interpretation, 50 minutes, about 11-13 questions.

That would be the break up you can look at, vis-à-vis this paper.