CAT Confusion

Updated on: Monday, December 14, 2009

When I envisaged writing this article, I nicknamed it ‘postmortem of the CAT.’ Little did I know, that as the first-ever online Common Admission Test (CAT) unfolded, the term ‘post-mortem’ would become so appropriate! Though many managed to attempt the CAT without a hitch, others experienced bizarre problems. Any attempt to forecast the score is fraught with a risk generally. And this year’s CAT fiasco makes the job doubly difficult. Here are some of the factors that might make a significant difference to CAT scores of applicants:

Many candidates were able to get more time than the allocated 135 minutes for the test. While the computer hanged in the middle of the test, the clock stopped. As clueless supervisors tried to reset the system, the candidate got extra time to solve the question that he/she was attempting before the computer hanged.

On the other hand, many candidates got lesser time than allocated — again owing to computer problems.

Some candidates did not see all 60 questions. This is because the screen blanked out either partly or entirely after attempting some questions.

Some candidates were made to attempt the test more than once.

As many as 10% of the total questions, were repeated from previous CAT exams. Some questions were exact replicas of questions from CAT 2003 to CAT 2005. Since, the CAT test papers of those years were officially made available by the IIMs, many applicants had thoroughly studied those papers. I personally came across students who knew the solutions of several questions by heart. They spent mere seconds in selecting the correct answer from options given with such questions. In an exam where admission to top B-schools of the country, can be secured by getting 30-40 questions right, a gift of as many as six free questions can impact the entire score.

Conventional wisdom suggests that students who stay relaxed and calm during the exam tend to do well.

However, CAT 2009 test centres were filled with noise, confusion, delays, and tears. I saw many students breaking down during test and begging authorities to help them.

There was a substantial difference in the difficulty level of the questions generated in different slots.

The ‘Next’ button to move to the next question was dangerously close to the ‘End Test’ button. Click a few millimeters off and it’s bye-bye CAT 2009.

In this scenario, only a paper-and-pencil retest of CAT appears as a reasonable solution. For now, let us explore the CAT 2009 sections and evaluate your performance.

If you have been a regular reader of Education Times, you would recollect that we predicted CAT 2009 to be easier than earlier CAT exams. We predicted the legendary ‘killer’ CAT questions would be few and far between, whereas the CAT exam from 2003 to 2008 was very difficult. Even bright students barely managed to attempt 50% of the questions in previous CAT exams. This time a large proportion of candidates managed to attempt as many as 70% of the questions. Several students even attempted well above 55 of the 60 questions asked.

HIGH OVERALL SCORES
These and several other factors might contribute in increasing the CAT 2009 cut-off scores significantly. Some other factors are:
Easier questions
Extra time: For attempting 60 questions, candidates were allocated 135 minutes, thereby giving them well over two minutes per question. In earlier CAT exams, the corresponding time was either two minutes or below that
As mentioned above several questions were repeated.

EXPECTED CUT-OFF
Every institute subscribing to the CAT 2009 score will decide its own cut-off. However, we estimate that the cut-off for Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) ie Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata, would be a net score of 58.3 percentage. Given the fact that there is negative marking for incorrect responses, here is an example of how you could score 58.3 percentage:

Quantitative
Aptitude:
Attempted: 14/20.
Correct: 12

Verbal
Aptitude:
Attempted: 16/20. Correct: 13

Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning:
Attempted: 13/20. Correct: 12
This would put your overall attempt at 43/60, with 37 corrects and six wrong answers. With one-third negative marking for each wrong response, you would end up with a net score of 35. This score should be adequate to get you a call from all of the top IIMs.

SECTIONAL CUT-OFFS
Predicting sectional cut-offs is a murkier business especially as the difficulty level of CAT 2009 varied significantly from day-today. But a good estimate of the sectional cutoff for the top IIMs (for each of the sections) is a net score of 50 percentage. Here is how you could score 50 percentage in a section: You attempted 14/20 questions with 11 correct answers and three wrong answers. With one-third negative marking for each wrong response, you would end up with a net score of 10, ie 50 percentage. If you attain this score in each of the sections, and achieve an overall score of 58.3 percentage, you should get a call from all the top IIMs.

SCORES IN EARLIER YEARS
The estimates mentioned above are significantly higher than the actual cut-offs observed in previous years. Overall cut-offs have usually been close to 40 percentage and sectional cutoffs remained in the vicinity of 33.

A TOUGH CAT
Whenever any test is administered on multiple days, there is the risk that one version of the test would be different than another. The statistical process of ‘scaling’ ensures that scores of all students can be compared. Though the actual process of statistical scaling is quite complex, a simplistic explanation would be: ‘scale down the scores of students who got easier tests and scale up the scores of those who attempted tougher tests’. The estimates provided earlier are for the average CAT 2009. So, if your specific version of the CAT was easier than average, you would have to score a little more. Likewise, if your version of the CAT was more difficult than the average CAT, you could get by with a little lower score too. But, regardless of how difficult your CAT was, it is unlikely that the overall cut-off would be lower than 50 percentage and that the sectional cut-off would be lower than 45 percentage.

A DIFFERENT CAT
Ungrouped questions: Usually, if a test has various questions on jumbled sentences, for example, they all appear in a group. This year, such grouping was absent other than in the case of reading comprehension and data interpretation. So, question one could be on jumbled sentence, two on English usage, and three on jumbled sentence again. This was one of the very few ways in which CAT 2009 raised the difficulty level.

Shorter reading passages: The length of the reading comprehension passages was shorter as compared to the previous years. Interestingly, most students received three passages despite the reduced number of questions. But unlike earlier CAT exams some passages had as few as one or two questions.

Substantial question-variety: Despite the reduced number of questions, the creators of the test managed to introduce substantial variety in the questions. As a result, there were very few questions of each type.

Quantitative aptitude section:
Education Times had predicted that algebra, geometry and number systems would be the most important topics in the quantitative aptitude section. In all versions of CAT 2009, at least eight out of the 20 questions were from these three topics. In some test sets, as many as 12 out of 20 questions

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CAT Confusion

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