TathaGat Faculty Shares His CAT 2017 Exam Experience

CAT 2017 is over and everyone now is waiting for some favorable predictions here and there.

I have been attempting CAT for 10 years now and this is my experience of this year's event.

I got slot 2 and reached the venue by 2pm i.e. 15 minutes prior to the last entry time and this saved my useless waiting time in long queues. Unlike expected, they allowed foot wears but asked to put off belts.

Coming to the test room experience now. Rough pad and ball pen was provided which was more than sufficient for me.

First section was VA - 34 Questions

24 Qs of RC (3 sets of 6 Qs each and 2 sets of 3 Qs each - all MCQ)

4 Qs of Parajumble - TITA

3 Qs of Summary of short passage - MCQ

3 Qs of Odd one out - TITA

As VA is not my field, so cannot comment much about the difficulty level. Though I managed to attempt 20 questions.

Second section was LRDI - 32 Questions

8 sets of 4 questions each exactly like the previous 2-3 years.

Sets were of moderate difficulty level, rather I'd say easier than last year as data was easily understandable. Now it was just matter of how much time you take to do the casework and solve.

Some sets had large tables and graphs while some had the whole data in 3-4 lines.

I managed to solve 5 sets completely i.e. 20 questions which I am sure to take me 99+ percentile in the section.

And Last section was QA - 34 Questions

This section was way easier than last year.

Arithmetic - percentage, profit & loss, ratio, time & work, mixtures, pipes & cistern, time-speed-distance etc topped with 13 questions.

Algebra - function, logarithm, maxima-minima, inequalities, modulus, quadratic, AP-GP-telescopic series etc also had 10 questions.

Geometry - circles, right triangle, hexagon, prism, coordinate etc had 6 questions.

Numbers - surds & indices, factors etc also had 4 questions.

1 question on PnC was also there.

Overall, all topics taught in any coaching program were touched and difficulty level was just average or below for a well prepared student.

I though managed to do all 34 questions 5 minutes before time. In my opinion, 25-28 correct attempt in this section should take the score to 98+ percentile.

I hope this analysis will help the candidates gauge their performance.

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Kamal Lohia

Guest Author Kamal Lohia is a graduate from Delhi College of Engineering and QA-LRDI trainer at TathaGat, training the aspirants for more than 10 years. He has consistently scored 99+ percentile in QA for last 10 years in CAT including 99.99 percentile in CAT-13,14 & 15.