CAT2003 Test Pattern

No. of sections:3
Total No of questions:150
Sectionwise time limit: No
Negative marking: Not specified

CAT2003 Analysis

CAT! How can it be easy? CAT-2003 re-test was no different - as tough as any other CAT. And as interesting as any other CAT.

The CAT2003 re-test was a paper remarkably similar in difficulty level to the paper that was conducted about three months back. It is to the credit of the IIMs that they have produced a paper which has maintained a very similar balance of difficulty between the sections to that in the last paper. That being the case, it is hardly surprising that the cut-offs, etc. are very similar to those estimated last time.

The team of experts from T.I.M.E., many of them IIM-alumni, analysed the paper very carefully keeping in mind students' perspective. Due care was taken to factor in the tension & pressure that CAT always creates. We believe that a score of 52-54 should be able to fetch at least one IIM call. To summarise, we believe that

It should be remembered that some of the IIMs may give weightage to academic performance and work experience, and may call students with slightly lower scores.

The sectional details are as under:

As always, you are bound to hear stories of how these scores are too low to be true. We are extremely confident that our analysis is accurate. It is always simple to spot the "easy" questions at home. It is even easier to spot them in the company of half a dozen friends. During those two hours of the paper, you are alone - and under pressure. You are jumping from question to question, desperately looking for questions you can solve. Under those conditions, the scores that we have given are very, very realistic.

Section I: RC & VA

The section was a trifle more time-consuming than usual though it was a little less tricky. A good strategy would have been to try and attempt all the 25 verbal questions and then do one or two RC passages. The "summary" questions were tricky and could have been dropped in favour of attempting an additional RC passage. It would have been wise to sacrifice a lot of speed for accuracy particularly in this section. As always it was very easy to make 4 to 6 mistakes in the verbal portion.

Section II: Quant

The quant was difficult as always. As we had advised students in our analysis of the November 23 CAT paper, the key to doing well in quant lay in the art of painstakingly hunting down the relatively easy questions. If done with a calm mind (!!), it was possible to find about 7 to 9 questions that could genuinely be termed "easy". There were another about 9 to 10 questions that can be termed "moderately difficult". Of these, one should have been able to attempt about 14 to 15 questions. That would have been sufficient to get you past the cut-off. Even most of the-very-best of students would have attempted only around 25 questions. So there is no reason to panic if you attempted 15 questions. It is this panic more than anything else that prevents students from getting a net score of even 9 or 10.

Section III: DI, DS & Reasoning

This section was distinctly tougher than usual. The DI questions were lengthier than usual, though the questions were not calculation-intensive. Of the 8 caselets (and 26 questions) in DI, it would have been possible to attempt about 17 to 20 questions from 6 or 7 caselets. There was good chance of making careless mistakes. So, as in Verbal, it would have been a good idea to concentrate on accuracy.

There were 6 sets and 20 questions in the reasoning portion of this section. Two of these six sets were relatively easy and it should have been possible to crack them if one kept one's cool and spent enough time in carefully putting down the information given. Nevertheless, it would have been a good idea to have started with the DI and then gone on to reasoning if there was time to spare. The DS was probably not worth attempting. Students might also have been caught napping by the change in directions of the DS questions.