CAT 2010 paper

Prometric, the company which was responsible for conducting the very first on-line CAT last year, has currently come up with a method to make sure higher precision in the entrance tests by bringing out distinctive sets of question papers different for every applicant in 2010.

"Every question paper is going to be a little different from one other, nevertheless its assessment will be done on the same scale," Managing Director of Prometric, Soumitra Roy mentioned.

"Because every question paper will be different, it may be entirely possible that a few questions tend to be tougher compared to others. We'll take this into account while managing evaluation," added Roy.
Experience of  Students who took CAT 2010 
First Dat First show

Here it goes.

hi guys my story

Reached the centre at 8am. Desolated!! Double checked if I was at the right place.

The process started with a simple registration desk on the ground floor. The test is scheduled in a restricted area of the 4th floor. I was pleasently surprised with the way the whole exam was managed and governed. Marked improvement over the last year. Since, you are not allowed to carry and eatables/drinkables, I would recommend to go prepared, esp, for the morning slots.
Well, the biometric and other processes are similar to last year and we were about 40 guys in one room.

CHANGE: Computers are not desk mounted. There is a glass top table and the screen is below. So you actually have to look down and attempt the paper.

The tutorial is a bit different this time around and I recommend everyone to go through it nicely. there is little to gain out of it, btw. You also get a 2 page Prometric IIM instruction sheet that forbids you to publish,distribute,distribute etc any part of the test in any manner so I will refrain from posting any direct questions here. This article should be jsut referred to as my experience on the overall paper.

After the administrators log you on, you would be given a verification code sharp at 10 am which you will use to start the test. You will be provided a scratch pad( 8 sides only)

Test Pattern: 60 questions, as already decided and announced by the IIMs.
My Test Paper: *****moderated
Paper level: 2009 level. Easily manageable

Sectional Take :

DI: Easy to medium caselets. Mainly based on calculations and very fundamental reasoning. Loads of pie charts and histograms. DS and Arithmetic based DI made their presence felt too. Overall, for all calls, *****moderated. There are caselets with multiple questions so, obviously, be careful that you 'mark' all the answers and the tab turns pink.

VA: again, no big surprises here. The outdated questions article on PG's main page can be ignored now [Smile] Passages are of average length with text highlighting functionality. You can highlight multiple lines. *****moderated. The all time CAT favourite Parajumbles were present, 5 liners and Last Sentence questions were also asked. *****moderated. overall: 45 minutes and 18-20 attempts

QA: Kya bolun yaar !! Awesome, Super Duper easy. I believe one who does not rely too much on theoritical formula and standard stuff, would find it easily manageable. With questions based more on common sense and attemptable easily within the time frame, i fell the QA cut off can be little high. *****moderated

Overall paper looks relatively simple to me. It may be a move to standardise the kind of questions for the adaptive pattern that CAT is trying to follow in years to come.

Please do not bury yourself in needless stuff now. Ensure that atleast all questions of the last 10-15 years have been attempted by you. Should give you a good feel of the types of questions you can expect.

PS: I could finish the paper in about 100 minutes and spent the rest of the time trying to find errata. There are some questions which left loads of ambiguity, but the easy part was there were no answer options with CBD or NOTA, hence assumptions were supposed to be taken [Smile]
These are my personal opinions. Paper patterns may change over the next slot/day/week. However, one thing is clear.
There are no golden rules to crack CAT 2010, there surely are some to break it !! Those would be:
a. Unnecessary attempts, losing accuracy
b. Preparing very tough caselets, ala AIMCATs
c. Ignoring the basic funda and key numbers (Pythagoras stuff, Special numbers, key percentage ratios0

Suggestions: try to master calculations, should save you tonnes of time.
Phew !! A long one.. WIll try posting more as I get on more info. In the meanwhile guys, start planning on GK for your other exams. It is in the best interest of your career. No one can over prepare for CAT [Happy]

Cheers.
I hope, I have not violated any norms as defined by Prometric guys and IIMs. If you notice anything, please bring to my notice and I will remove it immediately.
( Ignore grammatical/typos etc. Typing in a ziffy)
All the Best to everyone,
s k mishra

Vasundhara – Oct 27, 10 am slot, Institute of Business Studies and Research, Navi Mumbai

I took the CAT after eight years and in a completely new avatar. Though I was a little nervous when I entered the test centre, I consoled myself that if I got lucky, I will have the technical glitches to blame it all on. After all my first experience with CAT 2002 wasn’t all that great either. But to my very pleasant surprise there were no glitches and I could sit through the test, attempting more questions than I expected. Here’s how my second encounter with CAT went:

I was lucky to have the CAT test centre within walking distance of my home. Since I had not visited the centre before, I took an auto and was there in less than three minutes. It was almost 8:45 am by then and I was praying that they should allow me to enter. I was told by everybody to be at the centre two hours before, so the tension was evident. But as I spotted the entrance of the building and started climbing the stairs, there was one of the faculty members standing there to guide me. She took a look at my admit card, highlighted my Test ID, and my name and asked me to proceed to the fifth floor.

On the fifth floor was the security desk, where one male guard, one female guard and several faculty members were waiting for candidates. I was asked to switch off my cell phone and surrender all my belonging. Prepared for this, I had not carried anything besides a little cash and my house keys. In one minute, the officials asked my thrice to deposit my belongings. Then the lady guard took me to a empty room for further checking.

Once through the security, I was asked to start the registration process. I took my place in front of a webcam, got my picture clicked and then was asked to place my finger on the bio-metric scanner – right index finger thrice followed by the left index finger thrice.

Post the registration process, I was asked to wait in the same room, where already 15 men were sitting. I realised, I was the only girl there. There were candidates who were allowed to come in till 9:30 am.

We were then given our admit cards back, which now carried the computer number assigned to us. In over enthusiasm or nervousness, a Mr Manoj Kapoor grabbed the form of a Manoj Kumar and finally had to exchange it when his name was finally. During this 40 minute long wait in this room, there were senior faculty members from the institute who dropped in to make small talk and wish us luck.

Proceeding to the computer lab, adjacent to the registration room, I took my place at the computer screen. The first thing that caught my attention was the dense smell of fresh cardboard that had been used to create partition between computer screens. It took me a good 10 minutes to get used to the smell. The other thing were the loose wires that were hanging from my machine and the machine next to mine. One of the people on duty spotted it and tucked them under the table.

9:45 we were asked to start the 15-minute tutorial. Nine minutes into the tutorial, one of the candidates in the room ended his tutorial and pressed the ‘Start your Test’ button. It caused a little commotion but then everybody else’s tutorials were ended to even though there were full five minutes to go and we were made to start the test.

The first section for me was Verbal. It helped me ease, because atleast the questions are comparatively easier to understand than quant. During the test there were no technical glitches and it went smooth. There was a thin yellow vertical line that went through my screen. Since it was not bothering my vision, I did not ask for the attention of the people on duty.

2 hours and 15 minutes later, the test ended. I turned to look around and everybody looked as if they wanted to pop out of their seats. But we were asked to stay put. First it was the submission of the test that took long and then the uploading of the test to the Prometric server, which took longer. During this time also, the loo breaks were prohibited.

While sitting there, I started talking to the person sitting next to me. We discussed a few questions, tough passage and our professions. To my surprise, he was an IIM-A grad from 2008 batch and had been taking CAT for last two years. “I wanted to start my own business, so I have taken up the franchise of a coaching centre. Till now it was only for GMAT but now I want to launch CAT,” he told me.

Finally around 1 pm we were allowed to leave the lab and suddenly we heard a lady call out. Which one of you is a good speaker, she asked, and she pointed at two people including me. “There are a few members of the press waiting. Can you give an interview?”. I refused, the other agreed.

On the whole, a good experience and glad that IIMs and Prometric got it right this time. Hopefully the performance continues in the coming days when the candidates will increase. In my lab there were there were 22 other with me giving the test today.

All in all, it was a frictionless first-day for CAT 2010. According to Prometric, 4,548 candidates were due to appear for the test today, a far cry from the 12,000 odd candidates that appeared on the first day of CAT 2010. CAT 2010 Convenor Prof. Himanshu Rai told me that they deliberately capped the number of test-takers today so as to not overload the system. While the first day has been glitch-free, the real challenge for Prometric will be to ensure a similar experience during the weekend slots in November, when between 10,000 to 13,000 candidates are due to appear for the CAT on a single day.

It appears that several candidates today have been unable to take the exam because they forgot to bring a photo-identity card, their vouchers or the admit card or did not reach the centre by 8.30 am. According to Prof Rai: “The least we expect from them (the candidates) is the discipline of bringing proper documents and reaching their centres on time. The instructions have been given to them long before so nobody can help them (the candidates who had to miss the exam today) if they don’t follow the instructions.” He appealed to candidates in the future slots to ensure that they brought with them their CAT vouchers, admit cards, photo-identity cards and if applicable, their caste certificates.