CAT 2018 DETAILED ANALYSIS

“Bigger the dream, harder the challenges”

November 25, 2018-Sunday was the D-Day for MBA aspirants which opened the gate of IIMs for many students. CAT 2018 was a beauty! DILR and Quantitative Aptitude was a nightmare for majority as it was the toughest section which mentally depressed many students. With a lot of calculations, even reading comprehensions seemed to disturb the students as they were quite lengthy! Thus, CAT 2018 exam was a unique paper that will break all the myths in the minds of coaching centres and future aspirants who prepare for the exam with a predetermined notion about the questions, pattern and difficulty level. Let’s peep into the minds of the paper setter by analysing every section of the exam:

Quant was relentless

There no freebies and almost every question were multi-layered. Gone were the “If Ram and Shyam take cookies in the ratio 2 : 3, and Shyam and Krishna take cookies in the ratio 2 : 3, which of the following could be the total number of cookies?” of yore. The questions streamed down and were similar to

An alloy of copper and aluminum has 40% copper. An alloy of Copper and Zinc has Copper and Zinc in the ratio 2: 7. These two alloys are mixed in such a way that in the overall alloy, there is more aluminum than Zinc, and copper constitutes x% of this alloy. What is the range of values x can take?

Wherever possible, there was a minimum this or maximum that. And every now and then, as if the exam felt the need to rile you up more, it would throw the odd one from Logarithms or Functions. It was a classic paper.

VARC was a smidgeon tougher than last year, DILR perhaps a smidgeon easier

VARC was not tough per se, but compared to CAT 2017 the passages were a touch longer and a touch trickier. Since the choices were also dicey, one had to be very careful. Students would have racked up a lot of attempts here; the accuracy variable will be uber-critical.

DILR had 2 do-able sets and a few tricky ones. There were a lot of “MUST be FALSE”; “MUST be TRUE” type questions which are always a pain in the neck.

The pattern remained the same as that of the first slot. There were 34 questions with seven non-MCQ questions. There were no instructions provided for the number of questions in each passage. However, there remained five passages. One passage had four questions (the passage on ‘grover snails’) while the rest had five questions each. The topics of the remaining RC passages were also from familiar areas. They were easy to read. There were quite a few inference-based questions, but these were easy to attempt, thanks to the option choices. The options were not really very close. Only 4-5 questions from RC were tricky. However, a student should have followed the POE (process of elimination) to be able to achieve a decent accuracy rate as the options were not straight forward. The VA section had one major change. There were four subjective para jumble questions, and all of these had four sentences each. There were three odd sentence para-jumble questions. These questions were easier than expected. A student could have easily managed to get four questions correct out of the seven PJs (PJ and OSPJ).

These were TITA questions. The three para-summary questions were of moderate level of difficulty. The paragraphs continued to be short in the range of 450 to 500 words each. However, as compared to the first slot, the summary questions were slightly easier. Only one summary question appeared to be tough. So, VARC continued to be the ‘easiest’ of the lot.

VARC

·        The first section on VARC had 34 questions.

·        Non MCQs were 7 without negative marking

·        The passages were of around 500 words in CAT 2018 as compared to 800 words in 2017.

·        Total RC Based questions were 24

·        The topics on which RC passages were formed are: Genetics with four questions. Other passages on Second World War; Plastic Pollution; Elephant society; Consumer Behaviour were followed by 5 questions each

·        Passages had inference based questions also.

·        Two passages on 2nd World War; plastic pollution were easier.

DILR
Most of the candidates found the Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR) questions more difficult and could not attempt beyond 10-12 questions out of 32.

Quantitative Ability
Quantitative Ability section despite having highest number of 12 Non-MCQs out of 34 questions was found on slightly higher difficulty side. Geometry part was however, found to be a bit more difficult in CAT 2018.

It is expected that CAT 2018 raw score between 155-165 could fetch a percentile of 98-99 in CAT 2018.

  

An overall attempt of 18-20 with 85 per cent accuracy would be very good.

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