Exam day is over. For some of you, the anxiety would have finally evaporated. For the rest, it would be soaring towards a crescendo. We are creating a summary of the salient points from yesterday's Live Chat with ARKS Srinivas. This will give you pointers for fine-tuning your strategy in case you are yet to take the exam. Also, for those of you who've already taken the exam - it will give you a range of expected percentiles which can tell you which schools to target.
Verbal Summary - Vocab absent Verbal section - makes it easier for people without extensive reading habits. LR was tougher than other parts of the CAT.
The verbal section saw no vocab-based questions/fill-in-the-blanks. This would have meant that the advantage held by the literary types (people who had been bred on Oxford English) would have been blunted because there was no way to realize it. The great advantage about vocab questions is that they offer easy pickings for those well-versed in the language. The absence of this would have been a set-back for language Nazis because
(1) They would no longer be able to save time on the verbal section.
(2) Others (people less comfortable with verbal) would have an equally decent shot on the verbal section - since verbal experts do not have any special expertise in LR, RC and the non-vocab part of verbal.
Quant Summary - Geometry/Algebra dominate - DI has some tricky sets
In quant, Geometry and Algebra dominated, with no questions on the feared functions module. This again, meant that quant would be a balanced section offering no special advantage to engineers.
Other salient aspects, and cutoffs
There was no difference in the difficulty levels between the two slots.
It looks like all students within a slot got the same questions.
Practise - DI, LR, RC and Geometry, Arithmetic, Numbers
Here's a rough estimate of percentiles - according to ARKSS. Due to our incessant requests, ARKS Srinivas has given us a few estimates of the likely cutoffs. He is very clear though that they are just estimates based on his experience and he gave it on Team InsideIIM’s request. You can see that he has made a marginal upward revision as compared to the LIVE Chat on Sunday.
| Percentile |
Section I |
Section II |
Overall |
| 80 |
42-44 |
38-40 |
85-88 |
| 90 |
50-52 |
46-48 |
95-98 |
| 95 |
60-62 |
56-58 |
110-112 |
| 99 |
68-70 |
64-66 |
127-132 |
| 99.5 |
72-74 |
68-70 |
136-140 |
| 99.8 |
78-80 |
76-78 |
160-164 |
LIVE Chat schedule on InsideIIM.com for the next 3 days :
1) 19th Nov - Hemang Panchmatia - Ideal CREDence on IIFT - 9 pm
2) 20th Nov - IIFT Students on cracking IIFT and the School - 9 pm
3) 21st Nov - Himanshu Rai - CAT 2010 Convenor and Dean MISB, Bocconi - on 'Approaching CAT 2014' - 8.30 pm