Post the Common Admission Test 2005 you are bursting with questions about the test.
rediff.com, in collaboration with Career Launcher, an organisation that trains CAT aspirants, brings you a detailed analysis of CAT 2005.
The test was unique as far as the number of questions was concerned. CAT 2005 was a compact paper, but a drastic reduction in the number of questions was not expected.
CAT 2005 was a three section paper. This was different in the sense that those who were giving the test did not have enough questions to choose from.
A little more weightage was given to analytical reasoning questions.
On reading the instructions carefully, you would have realised that, though there were 90 questions in all, the total marks still added up to 150.
For the first time, negative marking was defined.
Questions with differential marking, which appeared this year, was the trend last year as well.
It is important to get some confidence behind you when you start off. Ideally, you should have started off with the one mark questions and tried to get four-five marks behind you.
You could have then looked at the two mark questions and checked their level of difficulty.
Last year, the two mark questions had a lot of easy questions. This time, only a few two mark questions were what you would qualify as having an easy or medium level of difficulty.
Looking at the paper, the English and Quantitative Ability sections seemed marginally easier as compared to DI. These sections, however, were definitely tougher compared to last year.
DI
The DI section too was comparatively tougher; you should have focused on clearing a seemingly low cut-off and attempted around 10-12 questions worth about 16-18 marks. About six questions worth one mark each and eight questions worth two marks each were there for the taking. You should have tried for a score of around 12 in this section.
English
In English, there were only three RCs so there should not have been too much of a problem in the number of attempts. The only important aspect here is that the answer choices were close; you should have taken care while marking the answers. Ideally, the focus should have been to attempt about 35 marks worth of questions that should have given you a score of 23; this would have boosted your attempt at the overall cut-off as well.
Quant
This is one of those rare papers where the Quant cut-off will be higher than the DI cut-off.
About six questions of one mark each and about six to seven questions worth 12 marks each could have been done if you had prepared well with your Mocks and FLTs, as these were conventional problems.
You should have gone for about 12-14 attempts worth about 20 marks and scored around 14.
Overall, more than 70 attempts translating to a score of above 48 would get IIM calls.
Overview
Here is an overview of how you should have attempted this paper:
CAT - 2005 Section Topics No. of Q's Total Marks Suggested time Possible attempts Possible Scores Cut-off's 1-A QA 10 10 10 5+ 4+ 14-15 1-B QA 20 40 30 14+ 12+ 1-A EU + RC 10 10 10 8+ 6+ 20-21 1-B EU + RC 20 40 30 26+ 18+ 1-A AR + DI 10 10 12 6+ 4+ 10-11 1-B AR + DI 20 40 28 12+ 10+ Total 90 150 120 71+ 54+ 48-50
Career Launcher offers career-oriented training and preparatory education to over 35,000 students every year across South and West Asia. In addition to training students, they partner with schools, universities and education companies (publishers, e-learning companies and technology solutions providers) across the world, who utilise their bouquet of education support services.
Part II: CAT 2005 versus CAT 2004/ 2003
DON'T MISS!
- Chat with the CAT gurus, Nov 21, 11 am to 12 pm
- Share YOUR views on CAT 2005
- Answer key for CAT 2005
- Estimated cut-offs for CAT 2005
- CAT 2005, analysed
- Solutions to CAT 2005
