Page - 1

"CAT, thy name is betrayal," most of the students who start their preparation few months in advance have this to say on the 3rd Sunday of November on the C-day or the CAT-Day. Did
you ever wonder as to why every year 1.5 lakh students appear for CAT? And this number increases every year by at least 10-15%? What is it that the top 1500 students have (around 1% of the students) that makes them successful for admission to IIMs? What is CAT and why has this test become the most sought after entrance examination in India?

Well, for the beginners CAT stands for Common Admission Test and it is the gateway to the best of the management institutes in India like IIMs, where average salary starts from half a million rupees to stratospheric heights of whopping 1.50 million dollars. Lets try to find out stepping stone for an exhilarating career like this and then we will try to find out the success factors.

CAT generally has 3 sections: -

1. Verbal Ability

2. Quantitative techniques

3. Reasoning Ability (Data Interpretation, Data Sufficiency, Logical Games, etc.)

CAT 2004 had 3 sections and 123 questions in all. The time allotted to solve these 123 questions was 120 minutes. So if we put it simply, we had less than a minute to solve a question.

So based on above calculation, can you guess what it takes to bell the CAT? If your answer to this question was Mathematics and English. You got it wrong. CAT is not a test of your Mathematics and English skills but is a test of your stress handling and time management skills.

Next

* Contributed by -
Brijesh Singh is an alumnus of Mumbai's Jamnalal Bajaj institute of Management Studies (Class of 2002). He has written regularly on MBA preparation. He is now Project Head, Top Careers and You (www.tcyonline.com), the leaders in MBA, MCA, GRE & GMAT preparation in Punjab.