Education, Careers & Professional News
Solving the CAT mystery
Source
THE HINDU
Date
2005-06-27
Information
The race for getting into the top B-schools in India has truly begun. The D-Day for the major tests are out. The Common Admissions Test (CAT), the entry point for the top IIMs, is to be held on November 20, 2005.
The XAT for entering the XLRI is to be held on January 8, 2006. In between, on November 27, is the admission test for Indian Institute of Foreign Trade.
These tests, especially CAT, tend to throw up some surprises every year. Last year, it was the differential marking scheme across questions.
So, whats it going to be this time? How do the students prepare for it?
V. Chari, academic head, Career Launcher, Chennai, answers some questions:
What is actually critically important in CAT preparation?
Mark two important words for CAT preparation - practice and consistency. And on the examination day, it is cool nerves and time management.
Any serious MBA aspirant would focus on fundamentals first and then try to cover as many diverse questions as possible.
What are the things that one can do apart from using the study material?
Normally, finishing off the study-material is sufficient, but you need to keep on learning. CAT rewards good readers. At a higher level of preparation, it is like saying, Can I stay ahead of the CAT? Can I look at the trends in previous papers?
In fact, there are quite a few commonalities between two successive CAT papers. Let us look at it subject wise.
English: Go through previous years CAT papers. You can trace most Reading / Comprehension passages, and even the Critical reasoning and Para-jumble questions to newspapers and magazines.
Last year, you could trace all 2-mark questions to June and July articles from The Economist, discover.com, bbcworld, and so on. In short, context is more important than content.
Regular reading of newspaper and magazine editorials helps an aspirant better. Quantitative ability has normally had most of the questions coming from number theory, geometry and algebra - about 30 questions from only these three areas. So master these.
Data Interpretation: Today, DI is more of comprehension than calculation. There have been a lot of graphs on situations that you see in daily life such as on cricket, hockey, and elections. News channels tend to do it by graphs everyday.
Every year, there are a lot of good students who dont make it through to the IIMs. Do they go for other B-schools ? And how different should their preparation be?
If you are a person with 2+ years work-experience in, say an IT company, you should aim only for the top B-schools for serious career growth. Re-take CAT.
Another try. Just prepare more and differently. In fact, we have a new programme called LEAP, for aspirants who have more than 80 percentile in CAT.
Not much in basics, but an objective to raise the CAT scores. LEAP focuses more on testing and how to improve scores by making faculty take tests with them and correcting them as they move forward.