Rumour has it that CAT will be held from 27th October to 17th November this year. This is a good 2-3 weeks earlier than the usual third Sunday of November. Notification will be out on 30th August and I expect a mad rush for booking slots towards the end of the window, i.e. near 17th November (I intend on joining the mob on this one :D ). While one week or ten days may not make or break 23+ years of aptitude building and 1+ year of assiduous preparation, there are other factors to be considered while choosing the slot.- CAT 2009 was marred with technical glitches especially in the opening few days of the test taking window. Although I have full confidence that such a thing will not be repeated, why take a chance?
- Once the examination season starts, I prefer it to be continuous rather than discrete. If one goes for an early slot, there would be a month gap between CAT and the next scheduled exam (read IIFT) on 28th November. While this may suit some people and give them more preparation time, I would definitely prefer to complete the entire season in a single adrenaline rush rather than short bursts (Let’s say I’m a momentum driven guy).
One interesting thing is that the IIMs have doubled the test taking window from 10 to 20 days. This will have a huge impact on the overall difficulty level of the question paper. The difficulty level of the paper is expected to come down a notch because it is extremely difficult to prepare around 60 tests on a difficult pattern (around 3000 difficult questions which is a gargantuan task indeed). Something for the underdogs like me to cheer about. This is my personal view, and of some experts from some leading coaching institutes but heck, with Prometric coming up with normalization techniques and all (and keeping them under wraps, even from the RTI), who knows?Other management institutes like IIFT have come out with their forms. The last updated status of some Examinations I have goes like this (not all are confirmed dates):CAT : October 27th – November 17thIIFT : November 28thSNAP : 19th DecemberFMS : 5th DecemberXAT : 2nd January 2011 Time to buckle up the seat belt and press the accelerator.
Ever seen a drunkard stuttering and sauntering towards his destination? This is exactly how I feel regarding my CAT preparation. Its like every time I take a step in the forward direction, something drags me two steps backward.
AIMCAT 1119 : Back at the right track with 96.6 percentile in this one (after a disappointing AIMCAT 1120). It was a respite from the tough questions in 1120. Verbal section (moi stronghold) had 25 questions while the other two had 20 each. Scored 99.67 percentile in verbal, which is my highest so far in CAT / Mock CATs.Missed the cut off in QA and LRDI by 1 and 5 marks respectively though. Still working on that.AIMCAT 1118 :Saturday, the 17th of July 2010 was a day which I was pretty confident about. After a good performance in AIMCAT 1119 and about 10-12 days of more solid preparation than I had done before, I was pretty sure of my chances. "NOT SO FAST you moron!" said the people at Triumphant Institute of Management Education. Next came 2 hours and 15 minutes of unimaginable torture. AIMCAT 1118 was a massacre of a scale that I had never experienced before. It seems as if the paper setters knew what all topics I had left out in my preparation and desperately wanted me to pay for that. At one point of time, even the monitor stuttered and went blank, with just one green light blinking lazily as if mocking my despair. Even the verbal section which has traditionally been my forte seemed to have deserted me.
The result was a paltry 54 marks out of 240, a mere 22.5 percent (wayyy under the 50 percent mark I have set for myself before AIMCAT 1110). Expecting around 75 to 80 percentile in this one. :(
I just hope that this is the nadir and that there are no more surprises along the way. Consistency will help a long way in boosting my morale right now.
Off Topic but I couldn't help but quote these lines from Eldest (Author- Christopher Paolini) :
" Ask yourself this : If Gods exist, have they been good custodians? Death, sickness, poverty, tyranny and countless other miseries stalk the land. If this is the work of divine beings, then they are to be rebelled against and overthrown, not given obeisance, obedience and reverence.... "
"It seems a cold world without something....more."
"On the contrary, it is a better world. A place where we are responsible for our own actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment....."
Something to think about......
Here comes the first shocker of the season. After securing 97 percentile in the first AIMCAT, I was pretty sure that I was on the right track. It seems that the paper setters at time had other thoughts in mind which brought be right back down to earth. It seems a mouse and monitor work better for me than a paper and pencil. AIMCAT 1120 was a Paper and pencil based test which was free and open to anyone interested (TIME usually comes out with these once or twice a year to offer performance based scholarships and to increase the No. of registered test takers). Analysis :
Verbal Ability: Traditionally, the section in which I should have done well. It had 11 VA and 9 RC questions. RCs were easy to comprehend and VA section too had some sitters. Just managed to hold my head above the cutoff line but Accuracy in VA is one of the main things that I plan to focus on in the coming AIMCATS.
Quantitative Ability (My Achilles-heel): I have been putting a lot of effort in this section and am pleased to see that pay off. Managed to clear the cutoff this time (had missed it last time by 4 marks). Accuracy is good enough though lot of work still needs to be done on the grey areas like P&C, Probability, Quadratic Equations, coordinate geometry etc. The difficulty level of this section was easy enough where 10 – 12 questions could have been easily attempted.
L&DI: Only one word comes to my mind – Carnage. It was my worst performance till date in any section of any exam. By far the most difficult section of the test, data sets were complicated and tricky. Only a good accuracy would have seen an average student going above the cut off score. Wrong guesses to some confusing questions meant my accuracy plummet below 45 and my score to a reprehensible all time low of 8 marks.
Overall, the test was patterned on CAT 2009 with 20 questions in each section. Barring L&DI, all other sections were easy enough. A good approach would have been selecting fewer questions to crack and achieving a good accuracy within those questions.
AIMCAT 1119 is two days away. Haven’t been able to study anything this entire week due to some factors. Hope it goes well.
