Quantitative toughest, but no real surprises in CAT 07: IMS Learning

Responding to MBAUniverse.com reader query, Gejo Srinivasan, MBA product head at IMS Mumbai, said, On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the toughest, I will rate quantitative section as 8/10. Verbal section was 7/10 while Data interpretation was 6/10.

Gejo Srinivasan added, The Quant section was tougher than last year, as some of the questions not only demanded a higher level of reasoning but also were based on tougher concepts. Conceptual clarity and a strong reasoning ability were a must to clear the cut-offs in this section.|

When asked what are the overall cutoff scores that IMS expects, he offered following predictions:
1 to 2 IIM Calls : 100+
3 to 4 IIM Calls : 110+
5 to 6 IIM Calls : 120+
MDI, NITIE : 90+
IMT, BIM : 85 90
SP Jain, MICA, NIRMA: 80 85
TAPMI, UBS, FORE, LBSIM: 75 80
IISWBM, Welingkar, IMDR, Praxis, IIFM, Great lakes: 65 - 70

Commenting on verbal section, Srinivasan said, The Verbal section was relatively easier compared to last year, but only relatively. There were 4 RC passages with 3 questions each. The onus was on understanding the passage as a whole rather than specific parts of the passage. All the questions were inferential and reasoning based. Some of the options were too close for comfort.

Summing up his analysis, Srinivasan concluded, The surprise this time was that there was no surprise! The structure of the test was similar to that of last year. However, within each section there have been some changes.

Quant was tougher compared to last year. DI did not have logical reasoning question and it was calculation based. Data sufficiency questions have made a come back. The paper all in all was an old fashioned CAT.

Mr Gejo Srinivasan is the MBA Product Head at IMS Mumbai. He did his B.Tech (Chem Eng.) from IIT Madras and his PGDM from IIM Calcutta. He has been mentoring students for more than 8 years.