CAT 2015: Alert! You may lose your score; Sectional submission made mandatory

A new feature added to CAT 2015 exam is the mandatory requirement of submitting every section after completion of 60 minutes allocated to attempt it. While making live the CAT 2015 sample test, CAT Centre 2015 has issued instructions for actual CAT 2015 test On completion of 60 minutes, the clock will stop, the particular section will be locked, the submit button will get activated and you need to click on the submit button. It further adds that the same process will be repeated for all the 3 sections. have marked the answer for review, or

How does it result in losing score, see now? If you have not yet visited the question or have answered but have not saved the answer or not marked for review and the time is getting over for the section, you may not get time to review or answer the questions which you are supposed to do at least a few minutes before the time limit of 60 minutes is over for the section.

In such cases, all your unsaved answers or not marked for review answers will not qualify for evaluation as the section, even if you do not click on submit button, will be auto submitted wiping off all your unsaved answers while you continue thinking that you did well in the examination. The result despite knowing the answers, you end up losing a big chunk of your marks and get scaled down in percentile score in CAT 2015. So be very very careful while going through the instructions before beginning the test.

This feature was not there in CAT 2014 and the candidates were required to submit the entire test after completion of all the sections.

Be on your guard; changes significant With the CAT 2015 practice test available on CAT site now, aspirants should be on their guard to note the changes proposed in CAT 2015. The prospective CAT 2015 takers should carefully go through the instructions, exam pattern, type of questions and their source topics to bell the CAT. Although the practice test has many questions from past CAT exams, they reflect the proposed new pattern of questions to appear in CAT 2015 which may or may not be on exactly same pattern. Another key fact is that the questions on number of topics appeared in earlier CAT exams are missing.

Questions on number of topics in CAT 2015 practice test do not exist but many new type of questions have been added in the test sharing the idea about the shape of CAT 2015 exam. It signifies that aspirants might not find questions on many topics in actual CAT 2015 test and on the other hand more new topics are supposed to be studied by CAT 2015 aspirants.

However the objective of this sample/Mock CAT paper is to make the candidates aware of the test environment. The actual content along with the difficulty level may differ from the content shown in the sample/mock CAT paper. Any change in the type and style of questions on any topic in the actual CAT 2015 exam cannot be ruled out.

No scoring without following instructions CAT 2015 has brought number of changes and amendments in the conduct and content of examination. Out of these changes, some of them are very important to know and understand to avoid any testing room problem and technical glitches. Prof S K Agarwal, mentor and Verbal Ability expert on CAT preparation suggests the aspirants to carefully read and understand the following key instructions

Changes in answer marking and Navigating instructions CAT 2015 has provided the facility to the aspirants to know the status of the question. The Question Palette displayed on the right side of screen will show the status of each question. There will be 4 colour symbols to indicate the status of the question on the right hand side of question-answer screen

Green - Answered question Red - Unanswered question White - Question not viewed Violet Question marked for review

The serial numbers A to E will indicate the following-

Sl No
Meaning
Colour

A
You have not visited the question yet
White

B
You have visited the question but not answered the same
Red

C
You have answered the question but have not marked for review
Green

D
You have NOT answered the question, but have marked the question for review
Violet

E
You have answered the question as well as marked it for review
Violet

View the questions at one go A very important feature available in CAT 2014 was the facility to view all the questions of entire test paper has been withdrawn and now in CAT 2015 you can view the questions limited to the present section you are struggling with. There is a Question Paper button below the profile in every section of CAT 2015 and clicking on it will show you all the questions in the relevant section with their answer options. This feature enables you to see all the questions in the section and also helps in taking the decision which one you should choose to answer and which one to skip.

100 questions with 28 Non-MCQs The aspirant friendly CAT 2015 sample test contains full 100 questions with 28 Non-MCQs divided in 3 sections. The timer is set to 180 minutes.

The test has 3 sections beginning with VARC section instead of Quant as used to happen earlier. Although number of questions remains the same at 100 as earlier, the division of questions has drastically been changed. VARC has 34 questions with 10 Non-MCQs; DILR has 32 questions with 8 Non-MCQs and Quant the third section has again 34 questions with 10 Non-MCQs. The pattern clearly indicate the type of questions you may have to attempt on CAT 2015 test day.

The test is lying on home page on CAT 2015 site and can be practiced as many times as you like to familiarize yourself with the actual CAT 2015 exam pattern, number and type of questions.