To help CAT takers, MBAUniverse.com Aspirant Zone is publishing a series on expert guidance by India's leading test prep companies. In this article, MBAUniverse.com Aspirant zone brings expert advice by IMS Learning Resources, Mumbai on What does CAT or CAT actually try to test in a candidate.
What does the CAT / XAT test in the candidates?
Article by Prof. Nilesh Sarawate, Director – IMS Test Prep
Is it Math? Or is it Verbal? But then, there are communication & leadership skills; plus one has to be a good decision maker and smooth operator; well, what exactly do I need to do to be the chosen one?
The question that has haunted lakhs of students for decades now, is a simple one – what am I being tested on?
It is important for us to understand the objective behind tests before we discuss what they test. When institutions like the IIMs & XLRI started, they had a good mission – to produce quality managers who will help India achieve it's dream of becoming an industrial powerhouse and a global super-power. Though intangible, we still do owe a lot to those managers because we can claim to have achieved a good percentage of what we had set out to.
With such a mission, these institutions built their reputation and quality of output through a very intelligent first step – regulate the intake because, ultimately the input is going to determine the output. Two years of education will help, but is definitely not enough to create visionaries of the calibers of the Tatas, Birlas or the Ambanis. With these as premises, these institutions set about their task of nation-building. For years, the takers were few, primarily because back then, in the market, a graduation degree, irrespective of score was good enough for getting a job and these institutions struggled to find people who could be trusted with such an important mission.
I have personally heard of students who were selected by the IIMs but could not get admitted due to personal & social pressures – they did not feel like they had lost something back then! Similarly, graduates of the 4 institutions (there were just 3 IIMs A, B & C and the XLRI back then – IIM L started in 1984), some of the brightest minds in the country with argument went about their job silently and systematically without even 1% of the fanfare that accompanies placements today.
Times flew and slowly, the concept of IIMs picked up and batch sizes, increased proportionately with the number of applications – a large hand in this was played by the Entrance Test Prep Institutions that recognised the value offered by these institutions and started encouraging more and more students to opt for a career in management.
What initially started as a selection procedure to pick & choose the top brains from amongst a few hundred applicants, the Entrance Tests slowly evolved to become an Elimination Procedure through which the number of candidates to be "really screened" can whittled down to sizeable numbers (read: thousands) as against more than a lakh applicants. Therefore, whatever these tests test is to clearly demarcate between the good (for lack of other apt word) and the rest (because they are definitely not bad). Are a few sums from algebra mixed with some RC passages enough to do this? Especially going by the mission that these institutes started with, is it not a risk for the country?
Now, let us analyze the CAT from a holistic perspective rather than from a test angle – after all, all of us agree that scoring in a test alone does not make one a good manager.
Historically, the CAT has never been about the areas to which the questions belong. A strong proof for this would be the fact that not all IIM graduates are comfortable with probability or permutations & combinations or even reading comprehension for that matter – if CAT insisted on a great ability in quant or verbal, these guys should not have been there!
Likewise, educational background, work experience etc. also does not matter because the batch profiles have always been a good mix of all such factors.
Therefore, the idea with CAT is not how well you can solve a question or even how many questions you can solve – again the proof for both the above statements are the facts that how you solve is not visible and for all you know, your "inky, pinky, ponky" answer choice could well be right and that there are no prizes for the person who solves all the questions!
Now hold your breath – the most crucial factor in CAT is what you solve. By what, I do not mean certain chapters. Get this clear: solving any particular chapter does not earn brownie points for you.
What I mean is selection of questions to be solved and solving them successfully. Assuming you are the examiner, let me ask you a common sense question:
Ram & Shyam took a test similar to CAT but without sectional cutoffs (for e.g. sake). Ram solved 30 questions, 10 from each section & scored 120 (all correct) and Shyam solved 50 questions & scored 125 (35 correct) – if you were to select one, who would that be?
I am sure most (I would say all, if not for those few devil's advocates) would select Ram for his display of brilliant selection of questions. Ram selected just 30 questions when there were more and he selected only those 30 that he could solve correctly. I am sure some would argue that it may well be a fact that he is good enough to solve any 30, but that argument would fall flat because then he could solve all and not just 30.
Now that I have established the importance of selecting the right number of questions and solving them correctly, let us see how it works. CAT or any other test will have a wide range of areas that it typically tests which is to ensure that there is no discrimination towards any set of students. There has been a myth that CAT is favourable towards Engineers because they are used to Math and they can solve difficult chapters like Probability & Permutations – this is a wrong assumption because if this is true, ultimately only students who are specializing in Math in Graduation would get through! Since that is not the case, you can be assured that these tests do not discriminate. As the country's leading Test Prep organization, we have access to results of so many students who take the SimCATs – leave alone overall scores, even the section performance have never suggested any biased performance.
As all of you would well understand, IIMs have a two stage selection procedure. The first is CAT and the second are the GDs & PIs. In order to successfully clear the first step of selection, the most crucial factor is selection of questions.
Selection of questions is no easy task – in order to be able to select the ones that are right for you, you need to have strong fundamentals in many chapters, understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and pinpoint the exact level of difficulty that you can manage. Which involve the following:
How important is the selection of questions? In my opinion, this is very important because there have been cases when some of the top B Schools have called students with 100% accuracy but not a great overall score (not too bad either) for the GD & PI. Also, the more you are able to pick the right questions and complete solving them, the better will be your mood while you approach other questions.
I am sure reading through this article has been tiresome – but then, you must be prepared for all those bulky reports you would have to read as a manager. As a Manager myself, I would like to give you a special advise – Management is all about deploying the right resources, in the right place, for the right task, at the right time. If one were to carry this analogy to the CAT, it is about selecting the right question (resource that will work for you), in the right place (section to keep a consistent performance across sections), with the motive of scoring maximum marks (scoring marks is the task), keeping in mind the time constraints (at the right time).
I am sure you will approach CAT/XAT or any entrance test with from the right perspective now.
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