CAT 2016: VARC - not tough to score 99 percentile; IIM Ahmedabad, FMS toppers advise plan how to achieve

CAT 2016 on December 4 will not allow you to save time in one section and use it to attempt MCQs or non-MCQs in other section. Besides now the CAT 2016 aspirants cannot overlook even slightly the importance of Reading Comprehension part in VARC section since it will command 70% weightage in VARC section.

CAT toppers from IIM Ahmedabad, FMS Delhi, IIM Bangalore have clarified that in next 15 days you should make sure that you have improved a lot in RC passage reading, understanding their contents and are able to answer their questions in shortest possible time apart from limiting your study to the published trend of 10 Verbal Ability questions of MCQ and Non-MCQ type.

In view of Prof S K Agarwal, expert on Verbal Ability and mentor on CAT 2016 preparation, ‘Going by the past trends in CAT exam, the sectional cut off at IIMs for VARC section in CAT 2016 may remain around 35% raw marks. Accordingly if you mark 13-14 questions correct with 100% accuracy or these are net correct answers after allowing for negative marking out of 34 questions (Including the Non-MCQs), you stand a fair chance of scoring between 96 to 99 percentile in VARC section.

Raw score-48=Scaled score-85=Percentile Score-99 in VARC
CAT topper and IIM Ahmedabad student of PGP 2016-18 batch Pranjal Agarwal had a scaled score of 88.25 that fetched him a percentile of 99.89, while the at 85 you could get 99 percentile. Since CAT 2016 is no different from CAT 2015, the same pattern is expected to follow this year.

Pranjal appeared in CAT only. His final scaled score in CAT was 278.06 (100%ile), divided amongst the sections as- VARC- 88.25 (99.89%ile); DILR- 96 (100%ile); QUANT- 93.81 (100%ile).

The scaled scores and percentile scores are arrived at after converting the raw scores to scaled scores and then converting them to percentile scores. The process is known as normalization of scores. Accordingly VARC section with 34 questions has maximum 102 raw marks. Out of these 102 marks, your net raw score around 45 marks can get you a scaled score of 85 and a percentile score of 99.

The top 0.1 percent scorers are scaled in top slot and accordingly the score scaling is done for the rest of the candidates section wise. After this exercise, the scores are converted to percentile. CAT result score card therefore feels no need to declare the raw scores and as such scaled scores are reflected in the CAT score card.

How to achieve 99 percentile in VARC now

Improve Reading speed: Abhay Agarwal, FMS Delhi
Abhay Agarwal, CAT 99.99 percentiler & FMS Delhi student advises the CAT 2016 aspirants“I applied all my efforts in improving my English. I read 4-5 novels in a span of 1-2 months. I read novels which were not at all interesting. This reading habit helped me greatly in focussing on the RCs. I could then critically analyse the passage and could answer the questions properly. Although it took me many attempts in the mocks but finally English was one of my best sections in CAT’15 Result.”

Take speed tests
Abhay shares further “My English was pathetic and also I needed to speed up my calculations in Quant to be able to attend more questions in the given time. There were several speed tests that helped me in this regard. Study Material was available online and also I borrowed some of the Arun Sharma books from my friends.”

Sentence fluency-key to success: Pranjal IIM Ahmedabad
Pranjal Agarwal, CAT 100 percentiler and student of IIM Ahmedabad advises “For the Verbal Ability section, the best way to study is by reading articles in newspapers and magazines, preferably on the internet. These would help in the Reading Comprehension types of questions. For opinionated type articles, it’s better to follow some online forums where people write their own articles. Reading articles also help in getting an idea of sentence fluency as well. For grammar, it is preferred to purchase any book with practice questions along with material of any coaching institute.”

Scope in VARC more: Shashank, IIM Bangalore
Shashank Heda, CAT 99.99 percentiler and IIM Bangalore student firmly believes and suggests to CAT 2016 aspirants “One must not spend too much time on a single topic. Joining a test series helps a lot in analysing the areas that need more focus. Major resources for the exam include coaching centre material (to learn the theory), mock tests (to analyse section-wise performance and to improve time management) and chapter-wise mock tests.  The scope of improvement in VARC was more when compared to other sections. Thus, I spent more time in solving passages and did detailed analysis of that section’s result in each mock test.
A few mistakes many people do is referring to multiple books/material for a topic but the strategy should be comprehensive and not exhaustive.”

Check where you stand
The passage given below is followed by a set of 6 questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

Fifteen years after communism was officially pronounced dead, its spectre seems once again to be haunting Europe. Last month, the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the "crimes of totalitarian communist regimes", linking them with Nazism and complaining that communist parties are still "legal and active in some countries". Now Göran Lindblad, the conservative Swedish MP behind the resolution, wants to go further. Demands that European ministers launch a continent-wide anti-communist campaign - including school textbook revisions, official memorial days and museums - only narrowly missed the necessary two-thirds majority. Yesterday, declaring himself delighted at the first international condemnation of this "evil ideology", Lindblad pledged to bring the wider plans back to the Council of Europe in the coming months.

He has chosen a good year for his ideological offensive: this is the 50th anniversary of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the subsequent Hungarian uprising, which will doubtless be the cue for further excoriation of the communist record. Paradoxically, given that there is no communist government left in Europe outside Moldova, the attacks have if anything become more extreme as time has gone on. A clue as to why that might be can be found in the rambling report by Mr. Lindblad that led to the Council of Europe declaration. Blaming class struggle and public ownership, he explained that "different elements of communist ideology such as equality or social justice still seduce many" and "a sort of nostalgia for communism is still alive". Perhaps the real problem for Mr Lindblad and his rightwing allies in eastern Europe is that communism is not dead enough - and they will only be content when they have driven a stake through its heart.

The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most devastating war in history at a cost of more than 50 million lives - in fact it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine. Mr. Lindblad and the Council of Europe adopt as fact the wildest estimates of those "killed by communist regimes" (mostly in famines) from the fiercely contested Black Book of Communism, which also underplays the number of deaths attributable to Hitler.

But in any case, none of this explains why anyone might be nostalgic in former communist states, now enjoying the delights of capitalist restoration. The dominant account gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed themselves after 1956 or why western leaders feared they might overtake the capitalist world well into the 1960s. For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda's Man of Marble and Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.

It would be easier to take the Council of Europe's condemnation of communist state crimes seriously if it had also seen fit to denounce the far bloodier record of European colonialism - which only finally came to an end in the 1970s. This was a system of racist despotism, which dominated the globe in Stalin's time. And while there is precious little connection between the ideas of fascism and communism, there is an intimate link between colonialism and Nazism. The terms lebensraum and konzentrationslager were both first used by the German colonial regime in south-west Africa (now Namibia), which committed genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples and bequeathed its ideas and personnel directly to the Nazi party.

Around 10 million Congolese died as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the early 20th century; tens of millions perished in avoidable or enforced famines in British-ruled India; up to a million Algerians died in their war for independence, while controversy now rages in France about a new law requiring teachers to put a positive spin on colonial history. Comparable atrocities were carried out by all European colonialists, but not a word of condemnation from the Council of Europe - nor over the impact of European intervention in the third world since decolonisation. Presumably, European lives count for more.

No major twentieth century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed. With the new imperialism now being resisted in both the Muslim world and Latin America, growing international demands for social justice and ever greater doubts about whether the environmental crisis can be solved within the existing economic system, the pressure for political and social alternatives will increase.

Question No. 1
Among all the apprehensions that Mr. Goran Lindblad express against communism, which one gets admitted, although indirectly, by the author?

1. There is nostalgia for communist ideology even if communism has been abandoned by most European nations
2. Notions of social justice inherent in communist ideology appeal to critics of existing systems
3. Communist regimes were totalitarian and marked by brutalities and large scale violence
4. Communist ideology is faulted because communist regimes resulted in economic failures

Question No. 2
What, according to the author, is the real reason for a renewed attack against communism?

1. Disguising the unintended consequences of the current economic order such as social injustice and environmental crisis
2. Idealizing the existing ideology of global capitalism
3. Making communism a generic representative of all historical atrocities, especially those perpetrated by the European imperialist
4. Communism still survives, in bits and pieces, in the minds and hearts of people

Question No. 3
The author cites examples of atrocities perpetrated by European colonial regimes in order to

1. Compare the atrocities committed by colonial regimes with those of communist regimes
2. Prove that the atrocities committed by colonial regimes were more than those of communist regimes
3. Prove that, ideologically, communism was much better than colonialism and Nazism
4. Neutralize the arguments of Mr. Lindblad and to point out that the atrocities committed by colonial regimes were than those of communist regimes

Question No. 4
Why, according to the author, is Nazism closer to colonialism than it is to communism?

1. Both colonialism and Nazism were examples of tyranny of one race over another
2. The genocides committed by the colonial and the Nazi regimes were or similar magnitude
3. Several ideas of the Nazi regime were directly imported from colonial regimes
4. Both colonialism and Nazism are based on the principles of imperialism

Question No. 5
Which of the following cannot be inferred as a compelling reason for the silence of the Council of Europe on colonial atrocities?

1. The Council of Europe being dominated by erstwhile colonialists
2. Generating support for condemning communist ideology
3. Unwillingness to antagonize allies by raking up an embarrassing past
4. Portraying both communism and Nazism as ideologies to be condemned

Question No. 6
Which of the following undermines the author’s thesis that the current attempts to equate Nazism and communism are not defensible?

1. Communist equivalents of the camps of Treblinka or Sorbibor did not exist
2. Nazi Germany initiated a war which led to the loss of millions of lives
3. Extermination caps were not build in the soviet Union to eliminate large numbers
4. Casualty figures in communist regimes are exaggerated but as treated as factural

Check Answers

Full length CAT 2016 Mock: Attempt & check where you stand
It is necessary that the official CAT 2016 mock test published by IIM Bangalore must be attempted and practiced regularly and repeatedly in the manner as if you are taking real CAT 2016 exam.

MBAUniverse.com & VistaMind experts have come out with the answers with detailed explanations how to crack these questions. Those who appeared in CAT 2015 might recall that the Mock test is the replica of last year CAT exam questions.

If you can solve the mock and score high in it, you can expect a high score in CAT 2016 too. Attempt CAT 2016 IIMB Mock Here

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