CAT 2017: Students Find LRDI Difficult; Reading And Quantitative Relatively Easy

The CAT 2017 conducted on November 26, 2017 had two slots, 9 am-12 noon and 2.30-5.30 pm. The format had no surprises. Out of total 100 questions, Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC) section was of 34 questions, Data Interpretation and the Logical Reasoning (LRDI) section with 32 questions and Quantitative Ability section had 34 questions. An hour for every section. Three hours to make or break destiny.

So how was it? IIM Lucknow, the paper conducting (and hoped setting) authority this time, eased up VARC and Quant. But what complexity they wove in LRDI, O boy! The blocks in LRDI were hardly solvable under time pressure, deciphering the block of information preceding the set of questions was not easy to figure out. The scenarios were practical – some seating arrangement in an aeroplane, with price structures associated with the same. Or an educational system, where a faculty member vanishes, and his students need to be reallocated to ongoing courses. All constraint theory multi-parametric stuff – but nightmarish even for Goldratt. Reading and Quantitative looked easy enough. 

Somehow, it looked the overprepared students were dejected – their memory work didn’t help. The exam, true to its character, evaluated on the feet thinking. If you had an aptitude for that, if your loved tricky reading, great. If you wanted to apply some rote techniques, then zilch for you. In fact, students who had hardly prepared, did pretty good – as they were light on mind, and freewheeling. One such student with just 15 days preparation could crack 28 in VARC, 16 in LRDI and 17 in Quant – of course the accuracy is what would eventually matter. Many a many months preparation students handled 15-20 in VARC, got scared in LRDI to 9-12, and thus demoralized, or what, couldn’t go beyond 15 in Quant.

Reading passages had easy language, the devil must have been in the intelligence choice elimination requires. Quant was abundantly replete with profit loss questions, almost non-on ratio, 5 doable geometry ones, easy to crack algebra, with sprinkling of permutations. This reflects criticism CAT has been having of preferring nerds who can handle complicated math, whereas industry requirement is superior communications and an analytic mindset. Overall, all three sections looked like having manageable TITA  questions, i.e. Type in the answer (these also bear no  negative marking).

Overall, a nice aptitude gauger. May the better students win.  The 2.31-lakh candidates registered this year can expect the CUT-OFF to go up. The question hammering their minds would be “Did I hit the 90 plus percentile?” The scoring scheme for the MCQs for each correct answer is 3 marks and for each wrong answer is -1 marks, the un-attempted question is not considered for marks.

A candidate to get selected for next rounds of the admission process - Written Aptitude Test (WAT), Group Discussion (GD) and Personal Interview (PI), must score the minimum percentile. The IIM’s cut-off percentile for 2017 is as follows

The factors that determine the above expected cut-off are the difficulty level of the exam i.e. the difficult the exam, the lower is the cut-off. The other factors are, Number of candidates, number of qualified candidates, number of seats and ranking of the B-School.

The deadline of the CAT 2017 events is as follows:

Well the CAT is out of the bag now, many will be crossing their fingers and waiting for the result in 2nd week of January, 2018. Wishing them Good Luck!

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Dr Gaurav Sood

Guest Author The author is a brand communication professional, consultant and educator with two decade practice of creating strong brands