CAT 2013 results are out and we are all aware about the controversies associated with the unpredictable results of students around. I decided to write this article to share my experience with CAT 2013. First things first, what I think is important for CAT is the persuasiveness, how badly do you want it and never say no attitude till the end, in spite of bad performance in the mock CAT’s. I did all of these and honestly speaking initially I was not happy with my CAT experience, I was expecting a maximum of 95 percentile. But then CAT results surprised (pleasant one) me with a 98 percentile. Still, there are many of my good friends who have even got shockingly bad result at 60 or 70 percentile, in spite of scoring decently in mock CAT’s. In all these days after CAT, I have researched about CAT scores and have tried to find out a trend. I am sharing the same here which might be of help to future aspirants.
1) First of all CAT is about accuracy. They give a very high weight age to accuracy and this I can vogue for, as I did only 11 QA and 17 VA questions- ones which I was 100% sure of. And not to say I was utterly depressed as one my friend had attempted 22 and 27 questions respectively, in the same slot that day. But after the results, I was sure about one thing that they value accuracy. As per my personal opinion, I think this is their way of testing a person on Psychometrics. As in under a stressful situation how much a person is able to judge judiciously and decide to what extent he should take a risk.
2) The second most important thing is, you need to have forte in at least one of the sections- either Quant or Verbal. In the other if you are just able to cross the sectional is more than enough to fetch you a good overall percentile. One of my friends has QA: 99.7 and VA: 47.7 and his overall is 95.5. Instead if somebody has mediocre percentile in both sections like 80 and 80, his OA would be max between 85-90. A lot of people I know, have a approaching 90 percentile in Quant and 99+ in Verbal and their OA is 99+. Thus a very smart way to crack CAT is to identify your strong area now, bank upon it and gradually improve the other in order to just cross the cutoff. This is much better than trying hard to achieve 99 + in the weak area.
Through this article, I am not justifying the evaluation system of CAT; I am just trying to bring in clarity as per my observations, as this is the best I can do, instead of blaming any process. And above all these are my personal views, “iska kisi bhi jeevit vastu ya vyakti se koi sambandh nahi”!