CAT-2006 (CAT-06) Pattern… What it May be Like?

Dear Folks!

Here are few prognosis of what CAT-2006 may look like –

1. No Change: It may actually entail no change from CAT-05, except for the time frame. As we all know that cut-off for IIM Calls was about 44-45 last year, with a huge number of IIM Call-getters between 44 & 50. This actually made CAT less relevant in second stage of selection process, as the performance in written test was not much differentiable. With increase in time frame, we can safely assume that this range of 44 to 50 would be widened to say about 50 to 65, affording more weightage to CAT performance even at second stage; as only cumulative performance is taken into consideration.

2. Change in Number of Questions: IIMs may increase the number of questions while maintaining difficulty level much the same as last year. Though, this seems less likely, if it happens, it will offer more choices to students and actually make test a bit easier. Also increased time limit would ease pressure to some extent.

3. Increase in Difficulty Level of Questions: IIMs may maintain the number of questions same as last year and increase the difficulty level of questions. More likely to happen, this would further tilt balance in favour of more logical and analytical minds. This would also bring out some new structure of questions – particularly in verbal section – requiring better comprehension, and greater reasoning ability.

4. Increase in difficulty level may extend the differential marking system to include even 3 marks questions or to making some questions compulsory. Making questions compulsory in a sense that not attempting such questions would earn greater negative marking than even getting them wrong would.

5. If we analyze the changing pattern of CAT over the years, few things become very apparent –
· Ability to deal with pressure is a key ability which is being tested more and more with every passing CAT.
· Time management and strategy have become singularly most important aspects of successful attempt at CAT.
· DI-Reasoning section has not only increased in difficulty, it now seeks organizational and decision making skills more than row calculations. Ability to deal with huge amount of obscure data, and ability to make sense out of it - is what is key to performance in this section. Remember tables with some missing values, or finding the range of value and answering maximum or minimum values…
· Verbal section too has over the years moved away from bare memorizing word-lists to more analytical and logical question types. Questions on contextual usage, on para-jumbling, on paragraph summary, on paragraph completion… don’t all these require very good understanding of language and a good deal of logical reasoning ability?
· Quants section has also scaled few notches on difficulty ladder. In good old days, knowledge of concepts and formulas was sufficient answer many questions correctly, whereas today what is required is the ability to apply this knowledge to various situations and conditions. This again requires very good analytical skills to be able to solve good number of questions in CAT.

Whatever the CAT may be like, one who would be able to bell this CAT would be the one who does not approach CAT with any preconceived notion of how it is going to be.