Bell the CAT

After much hype and intrigue the online CAT 09 is finally out. Specially this year's CAT is in news because of all technical problems students faced, labs getting collapsed, exams getting rescheduled etc etc. I appeared for it yesterday. To my surprise it went well without much technical difficulties although I had a tough time logging in the system and starting the exam.

Quite happy with my attempt keeping in my my preparations for exam. This new online avatar of CAT is very good. However it does have many shortcomings as compared to traditional paper pencil format. The biggest challenge being reading on a computer screen. This becomes worst when it comes to Data Interpretation questions. For me it was a 50-50 experience.

There is drastic change in CAT papers' format this year. There are total 60 questions to be solved in 135 minutes. Out of 60 questions 20 are verbal and English. The verbal section was very straightforward with only 4 types of questions. There were 3 paragraphs for reading comprehension with total 9 questions. A set of questions dedicated to grammar and punctuation. Rest questions were for completing a paragraph with most appropriate sentence and chronological arrangement of sentences.The difficulty level was medium to hard.

The rest 40 questions had a mix of quant and DI. There were 3-4 problems on DI with 10-12 questions among them. Along with it there were 3-4 questions on Data Sufficiency. The difficulty level for DI and data sufficiency was easy to medium. The rest all were quant questions. Some of the quant questions were real tricky. The key to quant questions was mathematical formulas. Most of the quant questions were based on simple algebra and geometry formulas.The quant section had medium difficulty level.

For someone who has studied seriously, CAT 09 was a free lunch. As the paper was easy one can expect the cutoffs to go steeper. IIMs might change the selection criteria completely.  That will come out after the results are out.

Overall it was a good encounter with CAT 09. Lets keep fingers crossed till 22nd Jan 10.