IMS Open SIMCAT A good beginning
The paper was different as was highly advertised by IMS but was it up to the CAT standard?. The pattern was a surprise but the questions were not that tough. The cutoff should go beyond 50 and that's quite high compare to last couple of CAT exams.
The paper was not similar to XAT as few were complaining. In XAT all the questions in a single block are related to each other i.e it is impossible to solve bit iii without solving bit i & ii but it was not the case with this paper. All the mathematic questions appeared in block but most of the questions are unrelated to each other. The design of the paper is good in the sense that the pattern was new, it required a bit of reading, fewer questions in accordance with current CAT trend but the AIW team missed two things - the standard of the questions was not up to the mark and the questions did not cover all the areas of CAT. Of late CAT has been more reasoning than anything else but open simcat was far from that.
Nevertheless it is a good beginning and the best thing about the test is that it gives a good picture of all CAT aspirants. Whatever the flaws with the test the percentile one get will be very similar to be in real CAT except few exceptions. It will not be possible for any other coaching center to conduct a mock with so many exam takers. Congrats IMS for that and I hope IMS continue this trend in all coming years open simCAT 2 week before real CAT.
50% Reservation but 100% lossers
I still remember the day when my class 12th result was declared. All of my friends were happy, except one – nitin (name is changed). He had a reason to be – he got almost half of the percentage that I got.Most of my friends joined good engineering colleges and left the city,so did nitin. He went to a near by suburb graduation college to continue his studies. He changed his stream to commerce from science.New locality, new college but he kept on doing things he used to do in class 12th and finally got the result for it. He got 48 % in graduation 6 less than what he got in class 12th.
After completing my 3rd year engineering examination I went to my home town. When I meet nitin , only one thing came to my mind – what a nice guy, so brilliant but such a pathetic career record. I asked him – what is your future plan. His answer was quick and straight –“I have no option, have to go for MBA. I am going to give my besttry for CATâ€. Few months after that I got call from him, no hello no hi , the first sentence was – Hey you must be glad to know that I got the final call from IIMK .His voice was in high spirits . I felt very happy for him. Now he is working in an IT company as a project manager.
But time has changed so is the belief & philosophy of IIMs. Now they feel only students scoring more than 50% in graduation can be good managers. They had a long experience of making good managers, soif it is their view then it must be correct and we all need to respect it. I am really sorry for any IIM aspirant reading this article and had scored less than 50% in graduation. But if the IIMs have taken this decision only to restrict the number of applicants then it’s a poor decision. Yes, it’s true the number of applicants is increasing exponentially and it s a tough job to conduct an all India examination with more than two hundred, thousand appearing for it. But taking such a simple solution to the big problem is not going help the IIMaspirants. There are many other options and IIMs should look for a better one – a screening exam like IIT-JEE is not a bad option.
Looking into the past records of IIMs, I think they have the courage to go away with decision of 50% eligibility criteria and come up witha new innovative and evenhanded idea so that all the IIM aspirants get a fair chance to show their talent.
CAT is over and so is my dream by born4iim
I reached my center at 9.30 thinking that I am just too early but when I entered the gate of the school I thought I must be the last person to reach the center. More than 1000 nervous IIM aspirants were moving here and there. All the seating places near stair were filled. I went to the notice board to check out my room number. After being fully assured that there is no place to seat down I went out of the campus but the place near the gate was too heavy with cigarette smoke to my dislike so I went back inside the campus and waited for the first bill to ring. We are allowed to go inside at 10am.
The omr sheet was given to us 15 mins prior to the question paper for filling up the reg. no and other details. I was shocked when I saw the OMR sheet with 5 options of 120 questions. At that point I decided to answer minimum number of questions while giving priority to the accuracy. As the total mark was doubled I knew the total cutoff will be in higher side. In all my mocks my target was always to score 1/3rd of the total score. And the cutoffs always stayed in that region. I set my target for CAT 2006 as 100.
Later I saw the negative mark as 1/4th and was a bit relaxed with it. First I started with Mathematics and must have attempted 10 out of the first 15 questions with in 30 minutes. I was sure about the answers of all and that gave me a lot of confidence knowing that I have scored around 40 in 30 mins and with another 2 hr in my hand. Till then I had seen nothing of DI and EU section. After staying 30 minutes in math sections I turned to English and after few glance I though of starting with an RC and I started with second passage. I went through the first paragraph with all my concentration but while reading the last line of first passage I realized all the words are just going over my head. I really don’t remember for how many minutes I lost my thoughts but during that small span of time I had visualized many things which I would never think in my normal life. All the confidences of mathematics were gone by that time. I looked at my wrist watch on the desk and realized I had wasted around 10 minutes with out attempting a single question. I had no other option but to sit there and try some thing else. I looked at last five questions they were about finding out facts, inferences and Judgments (Few sentences were given and I had to fig out which sentence is fact, which one is inference and judgment). After proving me that I am an idiot, the EU section was trying to show me – my true potential.
I stopped there and moved to DI section. I started with the question on class x board examination. To my surprise the questions were not that tough (or may be I am good with numbers ïŠ ). I answered all the 5 bits of that question with out much trouble. Another look at my watch confirmed me that 1 hour of my allocated time to show my worth is over. First 30 minutes fetched me 40 marks and next 30 minutes 20 marks (or that’s what I was thinking till then – All the questions that I have attempted are correct). The EU fiasco was out of my mind for the subsequent 40 odd minutes that I spent in DI section. At the end I have read all the questions in that section and came out with an attempt of 19. I thought of giving a much needed break to my mind and started marking all the questions that I have attempted on the omr sheet.
After marking all the questions I went to EU section once again. I did not have any courage to look at the passages so thought of attempting the questions on paragraph competition. I marked all the questions just thinking that the negative mark is 1/4th so even if I mark all the questions wrong except 1 the net score will not be less than zero. After that I had no other option but to look for another passage. Thoughtlessly I went through the passage on communism as like I was reading a new gossip column on ash.
At the end I saw 5 questions and some how I managed to attempt 4 out of that , though I was not sure about any. After spending few more unpleasant moments with the EU section I went to my favorite mathematics section. Mathematics has never disappointed me and that was true in CAT2006. In the last 12-15 minutes I attempted 6 questions on math.
The bell rang when I was reading the last question on mathematics the question was on geometry. I stopped reading the question not because I was supposed to do that but all the part of my brain had stopped functioning. I knew CAT is over and so is my chance of making it into IIM.
By
born4iim