CAT 2015 in its fully new attire greeted the test takers with anticipated changes and unanticipated surprises also on Nov 29, 2015 in both the sessions. Commendably, despite a high number of candidates, to be accommodated in a single day exam across the country, no technical snags and major inconvenience has been reported in the conduct of the exam.
Both the morning and afternoon sessions began on time and as instructed candidates adhered to the 90 minutes’ prior to exam reporting time at the test venue. The process was smooth and aspirant friendly.
The test instructions were enabled on the computer screen of the test taker 15 minutes before the beginning of CAT 2015. However, when began on time and without any technical snags at 650 test venues, CAT 2015 brought sweet and sour surprises to the CAT 2015 aspirants.
-- Each test venue had more than earlier testing labs to accommodate 500 to 1000 candidates in each of the 2 sessions
-- The easy and doable test was lengthy, this has been the opinion of the many test takers.
-- VARC, the first test section in CAT 2015 was divided in 2 parts - Reading comprehension and Verbal Ability. To view both the parts simultaneously, you had to click on ‘view question paper’ else while attempting the questions both the parts were not visible at a time.
-- Out of 34 questions in VARC section 70% was covered by RC only with 24 questions following 5 RC passages.
-- During the allotted time limit of 60 minutes, candidates found it difficult to catch the latter half of the test paper while maximizing their attempts. For example although RC passages were not tricky and did not have a very difficult vocabulary to understand it, test takers could not go beyond the 3 RC passages out of 5. Questions in RC passages were not so difficult to decode, but the need was of very fast reading speed alongwith indepth understanding.
-- Direction to Non-MCQ Verbal Ability questions to pick the Odd sentence appeared a bit confusing as instead of writing only the number of odd sentence which did not belong to the topic, test takers were trying to figure out whether they had to type the number of other sentences also along with the number of odd sentence after putting all the sentences in a sequence and making it a coherent paragraph.
-- Instead of placing as the first section Quant was placed as the last section. Questions were not very difficult but covered all the spheres of mathematics like Arithmetic questions on Ratio, proportion, profit & loss, time-work-speed among other topics; Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry were also prominent among other topics.
-- Questions were a bit calculation intensive. Although on-screen calculator was available, candidates filled up 4-5 rough sheets to arrive at the calculation. Besides, the on-screen calculator was taking time to open and time was the most precious thing during the exam.
-- The unexpected easy level of Quant section prompted candidates to attempt as many questions as they could. But despite appearing easy, questions were time consuming and out of 34 questions in the section, not more than 18-20 could be cracked within sectional time limit of 60 minutes.
-- Test appeared more tiring with DILR section. This section had 32 questions divided in 2 parts-16 on DI and 16 on LR with 4 Non-MCQs in each of them. Problem sets were not difficult but were lengthy to solve and needed more time. Test takers ran short of time in this section and could attempt not more than 10-12 questions, although they could attempt them well only due to shortage of time.
-- The presence of more Non-MCQs although pleased the test takers but it was not easy to crack them. The Non-MCQ questions present in DI like that on cubes or in Quant on arithmetic problems among others had to be solved first without any choice of answer options and only then the test taker could type the answer in the given box on computer screen.
-- There were many missing topics in VARC section. No questions on correcting the errors in sentences and paragraphs; contextual use of vocabulary; one word different usage; last sentence of paragraph among others were found in CAT 2015 exam.
-- Coming out of the test venue, test takers expressed that the test despite being moderate had a very lengthy structure. In their view removal of sectional time constraint in this type of testing pattern was very much needed.
Earlier CAT exams allowed you to submit your test before the expiry of time limit but CAT 2015 did not allow you to submit the test before the expiry of sectional time limit of 60 minutes. The submit button was enabled on expiry of the time limit only.
The modified question types could be rated as surprise elements. Candidates who were fear struck and were expecting unprecedented changes in the difficulty level found CAT 2015 moderate but lengthy and now they according to experts should expect higher cut offs in IIMs depending upon their performance in the exam.
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