Improving academic diversity in IIM class rooms is the key motive behind introducing big changes in CAT 2015 exam to be held in 1 day 2 sessions on November, 29, 2015 at 650 testing sites in 136 cities. It is an effort to limit the dominance of more engineering graduates making it to IIMs due to which the CAT 2015 convening IIM Ahmedabad has proposed these changes in CAT 2015 exam pattern to increase academic diversity in IIM class rooms.
Sharing the views of entire CAT 2015 group with MBAUniverse.com, the CAT 2015 convener and faculty at IIM Ahmedabad, Prof Tathagata Bandyopadhyay said that the changes in CAT 2015 exam pattern aim to ‘help IIMs bring in greater diversity in the classrooms and will go a long way in enriching the learning experience.’
CAT 2015 exam notification has brought with it surprises and innovative changes in the structure and content of the exam. Although this is nothing new for CAT takers as the Common Admission Test (CAT) is reviewed every year by Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) before finalizing the structure and pattern of the test, the changes introduced in CAT 2015 are the first of their type since CAT 2015 will also be having subjective answer questions in the exam apart from increasing number of sections from 2 to 3.
3 sections to divide weights
CAT 2015 exam will now be divided in 3 sections instead of 2 although number of questions will remain the same 100. Another aspirant friendly change aimed to improve academic diversity is the increase of time to solve the 100 questions from 170 minutes in CAT 2014 to 180 minutes in CAT 2015.There will also be equal time limit of 60 minutes assigned to solve questions for each of the 3 sections. Now the test takers cannot move from one section to another before completion of 1 hour assigned to the particular section.
1st Section
The first section will be of Quantitative Aptitude (Quant) only. Questions on Data Interpretation (DI) have been removed from this section and will form the part of another section. This section in CAT 2015 will contain 34 questions with a time limit of 60 minutes to solve.
2nd section
Second section will comprise 2 earlier sub-parts of the 2 sections. The section will have 32 questions on Data Interpretation (DI) and Logical Reasoning (LR). Earlier LR was a sub-section of Verbal Ability section. Now this section with DILR questions will also have to be solved in 60 minutes. Despite being shorter by 2 questions than Quant section, candidates will have the opportunity to have full 1 hour to score high in this section.
3rd section
The third section in CAT 2015 is renamed as VRC (Verbal and Reading Comprehension). This section will consist of 34 questions to be answered in 60 minutes. There could be 4 RC passages and 16-18 questions based on them. The Verbal Ability proposes to have questions on error corrections based on Grammar, tenses, punctuation usage; questions on jumbled paragraphs; paragraphs; vocabulary usage and so on.
Level playing field for all
Sharing with MBAuniverse.com about the changes in conduct of CAT 2015 and his vision to bring about holistic improvement at operational and content level in the exam, Prof Tathagata Bandyopadhya said “We hope to create a level-playing field for all candidates, no matter what educational background they come from”
The statement is significant enough since so far top rated IIMs and other B schools have more number of students from Engineering background. It may be for the first time that innovative changes in the computer based CAT 2015 are brought about to provide equal opportunity of scoring high to the test takers irrespective of their academic background.
In fact when the candidates from Humanities, commerce, Arts, science, medical & paramedical streams get the opportunity to score high in CAT 2015 with less weightage on Quant, they will sure be able to score high percentile and thereby will have better chances of getting shortlisted for final admission round. With some of the weightage awarded for gender diversity, the vision of CAT 2015 convener to improve gender diversity also in class rooms of IIMs may become a reality in academic session 2016-17.
Subjective answer questions; the game changer in CAT 2015
For the first time in the history of CAT, there will be descriptive questions also in CAT 2015. According to CAT 2015 notification, some questions in each section may not be of multiple choice type. Instead, direct answers are to be typed on the screen.
Answering the descriptive type of questions will be the real test of correct to the point, brief and coherent answers reflecting the writing skill of CAT 2015 test taker instead of jumping on one of the answer options. Usually those well versed with Quant do not practice much on it. Now there will be an ardent need to get such questions and practice well how to answer them.
Out of 32-34 questions in each section, if there are even 5-6 questions to be elaborately answered, it could change the scenario as number of candidates are not able to write coherent and correct sentences with right answers. This could turn the tables in favour of candidates from other than engineering back ground.
Quant not to dominate in CAT 2015
The domination of quant in Common Admission Test (CAT) 2015 due to the high weightage awarded to it in calculation of percentile has resulted in higher selection ratio of a particular class of candidates. This weightage is going to be reduced in CAT 2015 with the introduction of 3 sections, subjective answer questions and different scoring pattern.
Sharing with MBAUniverse.com on the issue how to overcome the problem in CAT 2015 and increase academic diversity in IIM class rooms Prof Tathagata Bandyopadhyay, Convener CAT 2015 and faculty at IIM Ahmedabad says “Regarding the content part, one of our concerns is, score in Quant dominates the percentile rank in CAT. As a consequence it brings in skewness to the selection process towards a particular set of candidates from a particular background.”
Apart from the announced changes in CAT 2015 exam, now the CAT 2015 centre would also be rationalizing weights assigned to different components of the test. This will help in removing skewness to a large extent to particular class of students.
The class profile in IIMs is evidence to this fact as around 80 to 85% students in IIMs are from Engineering back ground and less than 20% are the girl candidates in the class. To bring greater academic diversity the introduced changes and proposed change in awarding the weightage in CAT 2015 exam may improve academic and gender diversity in class rooms of IIMs and may become a reality in academic session 2016-17.
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