Students who took the CAT exam on Sunday saw an interesting but not necessarily inhibiting change in the question paper.
CAT entrance test significantly increase weightage to verbal from 33% to 44% of overall score.
?While last year was a reason-based test, the focus this year was on the vocabulary base?, says Gejo Sreenivasan, general manager at IMS coaching institute for CAT. Last two years the verbal, quantitative and data interpretation sections each had equal weight of 25 questions or 33% each. This year the verbal questions went up to 40 from 25, increasing for the first time the weightage of verbal from 33% to 44% of the total score.
Arindam Lahiri, director and co-founder of test preparation institute Career Launcher who himself took the test said, ?Though there were some ambiguous questions in the verbal section, both the verbal and the quantitative section were not more difficult than the last couple of years. Data interpretation continued to be the section students found difficult this year too. This has been a trend simply because data interpretation is not taught early enough in a focused manner in most schools.?
Last year the lowest cut off accepted by the IIMs were 120 out of a total CAT score of 300. This year it is expected to go up to about 125 to 130 out of 360. Additionally, IIMs have a sectional cutoff and negative marking of 1 for each wrong answer.
There has been a marked increase in MBA aspirants in India. In 2007, 2.3 lakh students registered for the test, 2008 saw a 21% increase to 2.8 lakh.
This could be attributed to multiple reasons. With the job market not as attractive as the last few years in India, number of engineer graduates with one or two years work experience deciding to sit for MBA has definitely increased. Test preparation centres had earlier informed FE of, ?Several enrolments from employees from companies such as Infosys, TCS, Dell, Wipro, Compaq. These are applicants who voluntarily decide to pursue higher studies and not ones who have been laid off?. Additionally, with heightened connectedness with Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, the awareness regarding options in higher education has increased and motivated people here to apply for qualifications such as MBAs. A reason institutes such as IMS and Career Launcher have spread their net to about 100 cities each across India.
Of the 23 test centres for CAT across India, Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai had the largest number of registrants at 52,238, 25,000 and 24,800 respectively. Delhi serves as a major test centre for the north region.
People with work experience taking MBA entrance tests seems to be a trend noticed by industry.
According to Sandeep Chaudhary, Business Leader at Hewitt Associates? Rewards Consulting practice, ?With the current whiff of layoffs, MBA applications to business schools both in India and the US has more than doubled in 2008 as compared with 2007, with a lot of the applications coming from people in the 27 to 28 age group who have experience in IT and BPO sectors?.
Takers of the GMAT entrance exam have also increased. At the end of 2007, 15,000 Indians across the world took the GMAT entrance, a number which is expected to go up by 40% by the end of 2008. ISB, IIM Ahmedabad and Bangalore all require students to take the GMAT for their 1-year executive program.