CAT Examination is a computer based examination held every year in the last few months of the year which is mostly November or December. It is a three hour examination and it comprises of the examination being taken in two slots the morning slot and the afternoon slot. Also there are 3 sections in The CAT Examination comprising of 100 questions in each section. You will be given a time limit of 1 hour per section which is 3 hrs in total for the whole examination. Every year different IIMs conduct The CAT Examination. However this year IIM Kozhikode will be conducting the examination as of 2019. CAT definitely has undergone a number of changes with respect to the pattern and the topics or questions which are asked.
Though there is not much of a difference in the CAT Paper pattern however the types of questions and the methodology may have a lot of difference. Also the level of difficulty can be a factor which can be a change in the CAT Examination as the level of difficulty varies every year. Also you have to be very careful about scoring as much as you can in every section. This is clearly because you would not want to miss out on your chance to secure a seat in the IIMs with respect to the sectional cut offs.
CAT Marking Scheme:
Moving ahead to the Marking scheme, for every correct answer that you attempt, you will be awarded 3 marks whereas for every wrong answer that you attempt, there will be negative marking with a score of -1. Also it is important to note that question no. 70 to question no. 75 are the questions or MCQ’s with negative marking and question no. 25 to question no. 30 are the questions without any negative marking. Talking about negative marking, you have to be very careful of this negative marking. Here’s one important tip that a lot of candidates do not really pay a lot of importance to and end up appearing all questions of CAT including the ones they are not very sure of and thus end up losing marks due to negative marking. So here’s an important tip. Answer the questions that you are 100% sure of. If you confront any question that you may not be very sure of, it is not worth taking the risk. You must leave that question and move on to the next preceding question.
CAT Paper Structure:
- Verbal Ability And Reading Comprehension, there are a total of 34 questions which comprises of 24 to 27 MCQs and about 7 to 10 Non MCQs. Also there would be 5 reading Comprehension passages given to you. Along with that, Verbal Ability questions consisting of a mixture of MCQs and Non MCQs would be 10. Also a number of candidates think Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension is the easiest section to crack however its difficulty level is supposed to be above moderate level of difficulty. Also the types of questions that would be asked would mainly be on paragraph summary or may be a jumbled paragraph would be given and you have to pick out the odd sentence out of the jumbled paragraph and so on.
- Data Interpretation and logical reasoning have 32 questions in total which comprise of 28 MCQs and 8 Non- MCQs. Now, out of the 32 questions asked in this section, 16 would be from Data Interpretation and the other 16 would be from Logical Reasoning. The level of difficulty for this section would also be somewhere close to difficult. Also you must remember that this section is extremely lengthy so you have to be very quick in answering the questions of this section.
- Quantitative Ability has a total number of 34 questions again. This section comprises of 23 to 27 MCQs and 7 to 11 Non-MCQs. Also this section has a moderate level of difficulty. Also here it is essential to note that the questions would basically be asked on topics like Arithmetic Progression or Profit and Loss or Compound Interest and so on.
Changes in CAT 2019:
The changes usually depend upon which IIM is conducting. Some IIMs usually do not introduce any changes in the exam paper pattern.
- If we consider the year 2013, there was no such major change in the paper pattern of CAT.
- In the year 2014, there was an introduction of two timings for CAT or the exam was divided into two slots or shifts.
- In the year 2015, there was an introduction of a calculator which gave a huge amount of relief to the candidates appearing for CAT.
- Total Number of Non MCQs in the CAT examination increased to about 27 from 26 in the year 2017.
- The candidates who appeared for the CAT Examination of 2017 found more of arithmetic related questions of a higher difficulty level in the examination.
- Also the most common one that we know is that CAT used to be a paper pen examination which has now become computerized since the year 2009.
- Also CAT used to be an examination which was divided into three sections initially then it got reduced to two sections and then finally came up to three sections again in the year 2015.
- The number of MCQs and Non- MCQs are not the same every year. The number of MCQs and Non- MCQs change every year.
These were some of the key changes that were observed in the paper pattern of The CAT Examination over the years. However, the number of changes as observed completely depend on which institute is conducting the examination. Also the number of changes varying every year.
