CAT 2006: The English woes hit aspirants

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MBAUniverse.com News Desk |
July 24, 2016
English Usage, with the lowest score of 60 percentile among all the CAT sections, has reduced this year’s overall average score by 1%. On the other hand, Quantitative Ability has attained the highest score of 100 percentile, while Logic and Data Interpret

The test consisted of 300 marks, with three sections (English usage, Quantitative Ability, and Logic and Data Interpretation) of 100 marks each. Like earlier this year too, CAT brought many surprises and changes. If English has the lowest percentile score, it is because it was the most challenging section. Sheweta Bajpai, MBA aspirant, said, “I think the verbal section was the surprise element. The RCs in the verbal section were hard to be comprehended. DI was easy and Maths was easy. The other expected elements were the flat 4 makers in the entire paper.” 

Every single question in the English section was inferential, with the options being extremely close. Ashish Chodankar, an MBA aspirant, said, “I found the fact inference question tough to tackle. Maths and DI were comparatively easier.” Also, there were five options instead of four making it similar to GRE/GMAT.  

On the other hand, there is also the belief that CAT was relatively easier this time. Mr Hemrajani, Director of IMS Applect, a subsidiary of Institute of Management Studies (IMS), feels that students could have fared better if they were given increased timing and less number of questions to solve. Instead of 90 questions as expected, there were only 75 questions to attempt in two and a half hours. Despite all this, the highest total this year is 67.95%, which is less than last year’s cut off. 

If you compare the result with last year’s, 99% for English was 24 out of 50, while it is 81 out of 100 this year. For Maths, the 99 percentile was 19 out of 50 last year while it is 81 out of 100 this year. For DI and Logic, it was 16 out of 50 last year, which is 67 out of 100 this year. According to Hemrajani, a section-wise cut-off expectation would be 35-40 marks in Maths and DI, and 30-35 in Logic and 20-25 in English. Last year, the overall cut-off was 45-55 marks.  

Students were expecting the cut-off for shortlisted candidates to go up this year. “Going by the IIM-A results (at around 98.3 percentile) it has actually come down by almost 1%,” said an IndiaTimes spokesperson.