Unlike last year, CAT 2016 had no sub-sectional time limit. CAT 2016 was held on 4th December, 2016. More than 2.3 lakh students sat for the entrance test. The exam was held in two batches and a total of 138 venues were allocated.An overall attempt of 65+ questions with an accuracy of 80 to 85 percent should be classified as a good performance in this test. The expected CAT 2016 cut-off is 155-160.CAT 2016 Result will be announced in the month of January 2017.
Batch I: The batch I exam was conducted in the morning. Candidates sitting for this batch were capable of answering the exam well, as most questions had been expected without any major surprises. CAT 2016 followed the difficulty level of CAT 2015 along with the number of questions.
Batch II: The Batch -II was more or less similar to Batch I paper. Each section had a few tough questions. VARC was the easiest section while DILR was slightly tough. In the latter, there was one lesser question than last year.
There were three sections, Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC), Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR) and Quantitative Ability (QA), had 34, 32 and 34 questions, respectively with a time limit of one hour for each section. However, there was no sub-sectional time limit, as seen in the paper last year.
The CAT 2016 exam interface was similar to the ones provided in the official CAT Mock test. However, there were no sub-divisions within each section and the VARC and DILR questions were interspersed within the sections and were not a separate sub section. All questions in a section were accessible within the sectional time limit. And unlike the last year where scientific calculators were provided, this time only simple calculators were given to the candidates. There was an arrow present near the question palette which when clicked extended the question window to full screen view by hiding the question palette & vice versa, so that the candidate can just focus on the question. At the end of the test, a summary of number of questions attempted, visited and not visited was displayed for each section.
Section – wise Analysis
CAT 2016 followed the similar structure overall as that of CAT 2015 and each section was allotted 60 minutes each, without going back and forth between sections, however, there was no restriction in the order of attempting questions within the section.
Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension:
This section consisted of 34 questions in all. The Reading Comprehension section consisted of 24 questions with a total of 5 passages. The Verbal Ability sections had 10 questions in all further divided into 4 questions for para-jumble, 3 questions of summary and 3 questions for para-jumble (odd sentence out). The difficulty level of this section can be rated as easy giving you good attempts of 27-28. The questions in this section were a mix of direct and inferential type. Overall, the Verbal Ability questions were mostly non-MCQ or TITA type. The section was vocabulary intensive.
Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning:
This section had 32 questions with four sets in this section. Every section had one very difficult question to crack. Candidates would have able to do 5 sets out of 8. This section was moderately difficult.Compared to the other two sections, the non-MCQs were lesser in this section. There were wrong and misleading questions in this section which confused the candidates. “There were at least two errors in the Quant section of the paper. One question on Time & Distance and One question on Progressions were clearly wrong.
Quantitative Ability:
This section had 34 questions out of which only 7-8 were MCQs, rest was subjective questions. This section was the trickiest among the three. Although the numbers of questions were less as compared to the other two, they were more time consuming and calculation intensive in nature. There were 16 questions each from the DI and LR areas. There were approximately 10 non-MCQs in this section. Unlike last year, non-MCQs were dispersed across sets. This section was divided into five subsections and was moderately difficult hence fetching you a good attempt of 22-25 in QA.
The first slot of CAT 2016 has been reported to be more or less similar to last year with no surprises. No new question types were seen in any of the sections. An overall attempt of 65+ questions with an accuracy of 80 to 85 percent should be classified as a good performance in this test.