A Brief Overview

Knowledge, as it should be is the prerequisite for this examination but its unique feature remains its unpredictability.

Although the examination details have outlined the course covered as spread over 4 distinctive sections of Quantitative Aptitude (QA), Data Interpretation (DI), Reading Comprehension (RC) & Verbal Ability (VA) the actual paper need not have any preset pattern or division of sections.

The other features, which require mention, are Negative Marking & Adequate Competence across all sections. Though the actual extent of negative marking remains undisclosed, it is an integral part of evaluation. Adequate Competence across all sections requires of a student to perform in all sections to a certain minimum level & once again though under the purview of the evaluation committee, section cutoffs must be catered to during preparation.

Individual Sectional Insight

Quantitative Ability (QA)

• The questions are designed to stress more on reasoning skills of the candidates, rather than on their computational skills.
• The level of difficulty of this section is perceived to be higher because the questions are not only lengthy to read but at times require more effort in terms of understanding and solving.

Data Interpretation (DI)

• As the name suggests, this section presents data to the candidate in forms such as caselets, pie diagrams, bar graphs, etc and questions are set to evaluate the candidate’s skills at analyzing the given information.
• Data Sufficiency questions in this section are based on basic mathematics (at times Data Sufficiency is a part of the Quantitative Ability section).

Reading Comprehension (RC)

• CAT usually has 6-8 passages in the RC section, with an overall length of 4500-5500 words and about 50 questions to answer in a span of about 30 minutes. However this too can vary according to the level of difficulty of questions.

Verbal Ability (VA)

• This section explores your understanding of the English Language and also tests you on Reasoning Skills.
• The questions in this section typically comprise sentence correction, sentence sequencing , verbal reasoning etc.