CAT 2008 – What the Experts have to say
Serene, soothing and expected. There was nothing in CAT 2008 which would cause panic among students (as CAT has been tagged to be doing during past years) !
Coming to the point, there were three sections, viz., Quantitative Ability (25 Questions), DI & Reasoning Ability (25 Questions) and Verbal Ability (40 Questions). The extra 15 questions from VA made a total of 90 questions.
Here is a tabular presentation of the vital statistics:
| Section | Question Breakup | Number of | Expected |
| questions | Sectional | ||
| Cut-Off | |||
| Quantitative Ability | Arithmetic | 8 | 9-10 |
| Algebra | 6 | ||
| Geometry | 5 | ||
| Miscellaneous / Puzzle Type | 6 | ||
| DI & Reasoning Ability | Tables | 6 | 10-12 |
| Bar Charts | 4 | ||
| Puzzles | 15 | ||
| Verbal Ability | Reading Comprehension | 20 | 12-14 |
| Word Usage | 4 | ||
| Sentence Completion (Fill in | 4 | ||
| the Blanks type two) | |||
| Error finding | 4 | ||
| Erroneous sentence in a | 4 | ||
| passage | |||
| Overall | 90 | 33-35 |
Let us look at the three sections one after the other.
Quantitative Ability: The questions were evenly divided among Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry and Miscellaneous types. There were 6 very easy questions and 12 with moderate difficulty level, rest being of high difficulty level (please look into our detailed analysis of each question for broader understanding). The cut-off is expected to be around 10 questions (40 marks) in this section. If you are gunning for Top 20 B Schools, then a score of 7-8 questions (30 marks) should suffice.
DI and Reasoning Ability: This section had questions from Bar Chart, Table and Puzzle type. The Puzzle type questions obviously had their dominance with 15 of them appearing, out of which 6 were really easy. A total of 12-14 questions could have been attempted with fairly high rate of accuracy. Expected cut-off shall fall around 12-14 questions (50 marks). For top 20 B School, the expected cut-off shall hover around 8-9 questions (35-36 marks).
Verbal Ability: The increased number of questions in this section is a clear indicator that IIMs have made up their mind in the favour of English-Comfortable crowd. There were no surprises though within this section except the extra questions. The four passages which carried total 20 questions and these passages were from Language, Humanities, Arts and Economics. Two of these passages shall have been attempted by every serious aspirant.
Questions on Word-Usage, Sentence Completion, Appropriate Word and Error Finding had a mix of easy/moderate/high difficulty level. The jumbled paragraph has gone out of the good book of the examiner this time. The expected cut-off in this section shall be 12-14 questions (50 marks) for IIMs and 8-10 questions (35-36 marks) for top 20 B Schools.
Overall, the paper had a moderate difficulty level and a score of 125-130 shall be able to fetch you a GDPI call from the legendary IIMS.
Good Luck, Nagesh Banchhor (IIMK) CEO, PRO-C Education
