Every year, Common Admission Test (CAT), for the IIMs and various other B-schools, manages to keep everyone wondering about the format of its question paper. Be it the total number of questions, marks allotted per question or varying difficulty levels of different sections, CAT has enough permutations to baffle aspirants. But it is not only the aspirants, even the four popular coaching institutes (IMS, PT, CL and TIME) are as puzzled. In a reality check done on November 19 to see what the answer keys of different coaching institutes had in store, presented huge variations in the answer keys.
These four institutes train more than half of the total number of CAT aspirants every year and therefore answer keys of these institutes were referred. This year’s CAT had 75 questions and when answer keys were compared it was found that answers for 19 questions differed. This accounts for more than 25% of the total number of questions. So a candidate calculating his or her CAT score will either have four sets of score cards, per coaching institute basis, or will simply not be able to get a final score. Of course there will be one answer key that will have minimum errors, or may be none, amongst the four in it but even then the other three will certainly have errors.
This is an area of concern and a pressing need to address this. Further analysis revealed that the language section had 14 such questions while Data Interpretation had four and Quant section had one such question (refer to the table). Pre-empting the pattern of the CAT paper has been the dream of every coaching institute and this is understandable considering the nature of the exam that emphasises on ‘on your toes’ thinking. But when it comes to solving a CAT paper and providing students with the right answer, isn’t it time that top brains of all these coaching institutes sit together to arrive at a consolidated answer key, after a thorough discussion and analysis. This will help lakhs of students strategising for their other examinations and will also put an end to this wide-spread confusion.
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