Sunday 26 July 2015

CAT 2015 : New pattern insights


It's been quite a while since my last post and this as well comes in an ad-hoc manner. No time to waste, something useful to offer, maybe. Let's get on with this right away.
CAT-mania is back again with IIM announcing the new pattern details for MBA aspirants this morning. Let me list down the highlights and elucidate what it could mean for the aspirant(it would be subject to opinion, judgment and suggestions, so please free to ignore or accept at your discretion).

Highlights
1. Duration : 180 minutes ; Changing up from last year's 170 minutes allocation.

Might just be some OCD problem for the deliberators to have 60-60-60 minutes for the later mentioned pattern change to 3 sections. Don't worry about this!


2. 3 sections : Quantitative Ability(34 Questions); Verbal Ability(34 Questions); LRDI(32 Questions)

Umm..really what's the change?
Last year had two sections : QA-DI(50 Questions) and VA-LR(50 Questions) with invariably a 34-16 question distribution across slots. Teaching you the associative law of addition maybe.


Okay. You might be wondering what's the point of reading this one if there's no change.So let's get to the noticeable changes now which could be significant in tweaking your exam strategies to suit the need.

3. Some questions may not be multiple-choice questions(MCQs) and answer would be required to be typed directly into a text box.

Change : ETG(Elimination To Glory) technique might not come handy in some questions.

Strategy : Do work on concepts from ground zero and not superficially or with just short-cuts. Concept clarity will help you eliminate this pit-fall. QA section will be sorted through these minute considerations and for the DI section, well, the formulators offer you the solution in their next change.

4. Use of basic on-screen calculator is allowed! (First time ever. God bless their souls)

Change : You have calculators to do your calculations(Misdirection!)


Strategy : Don't take this as a cue for not doing calculations while preparation. You will be highly misdirected in that approach. Just fine tune your calculation and approximation methods to use calculator wherever manual calculation is subject to rounding off things and similar areas. I ll try to come up with an article to describe where you could use it in another ad-hoc article someday if possible. Till then use your own discretion.
5. 60 minutes for each section with no section switching allowed.

Change : Change is not in the section-switching scheme but in the scheme of things of your overall strategy for score maximization

Strategy : You cannot be thinking of dominating LR to cover up for VA(vice-versa) or DI for QA(vice-versa). A test of your managerial abilities in the screening phase. Reaching optimum levels in each and maximizing the score in your strength area would be key to success.


Additional Tip : Use a round-robin form of preparation initially for varied topics in each section and then work towards focused strengthening of 2 sub-topics in each section to help you an easy sail in the stormy weather.


Leave comments for any queries, worries or questions you may have. Like and share the post to relieve the jitters flowing around that come with pattern change each time.
Rules of game have changed, but the game hasn't. All the best!

Cheers!
AS

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