The Common Admission Test (CAT 2019), the scores of which are used in the admission process for the MBA and other management programs in the IIMs and several other institutes, took place at 376 test centers spread across 156 cities on November 24.

CAT 2019 Difficulty Levels ‘Moderate or Tough’

Vijay Jha, Academic Head, CAT and Aptitude Exams at Gradeup described the test as “moderate to tough”. Ramnath Kankadandi, National CAT Course Director, T.I.M.E. said, overall, the exam appears to be somewhat easier than CAT 2018.

About 2.44 lakh candidates had appeared for the 3-hour-long computerized test comprising three sections–Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC), Quantitative Ability (QA) Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR). Each section was to be completed in 60 minutes.

VARC, Toughest Section in CAT 2019

Vijay Jha said he found VARC to be the toughest with Quantitative Ability (QA) and DILR also equally intimidating.

Career Launcher Vice-President Gautam Bawa said VARC had two passages that were difficult and he expected the cutoff in VARC to come down by about 6 – 8 marks. Both DILR and Quant were slightly easier than last year, he added.

Ramnath said VARC was slightly more difficult compared to the relatively easier levels of the past three years, QA and LRDI were easier than that of the previous year.

While the VARC section comprised 24 Reading Comprehension (RC) questions and 10 Verbal Ability (VA) questions, the difficulty level in RC questions were considerably more than that of the previous three years, even for those familiar with the language, he added.

Quantitative Analysis, By No Means Easy

Ramnath said while the difficulty level of Quantitative Analysis (QA) was slightly lower than that of CAT 2018, it was not as easy as that of CAT 2017.

CAT 2019 Test Details

The candidates were allotted exactly 60 minutes for answering questions in each of the three sections. They were not allowed to switch from one section to another and had to complete each section before proceeding to the next section.

Some questions in each section were not of the multiple-choice type. Instead, candidates were to type the answers on the screen within the given time period as explained in the tutorials on the test format. They were allowed to use the basic onscreen calculator for computation.

While Section 1 and 2, VA & RC and DI & LR had 32 questions each, section 3, QA had 34 questions.

The result of CAT 2019 is expected in January 2020. IIM Kozhikode was the officiating IIM for the CAT this year.

Apart from the 20 IIMs, about 500 business schools, including FMS, MDI, SPJIMR, IITs, IMI and JBIMS accept CAT scores.

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