How tough is the CAT exam? 🤔
The Common Admission Test, commonly known as CAT is the most important exam for MBA aspirants in India. Most Indian B-Schools accept your CAT scores in their admission process. Hence, we cannot undermine the importance of this examination. Many aspirants before starting with their preparation often wonder how tough is CAT. Is it just another aptitude examination, or it is more than that? Well, in this article, we will try to discuss how tough is the CAT exam in detail.
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What does CAT test?
The CAT primarily tests whether you can solve a set of questions in a time-bound environment. The questions in themselves might not be too difficult, but when there is a certain amount of time that you can give to a question, the difficulty of the question automatically increases. So let us go section-wise and determine what is the difficulty level you can expect in each section and how do you go about it.
How tough is VARC?
The VARC (Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension) section focuses on your comprehension and verbal skills. If you are already in the habit of reading a lot of material, whether they are books, magazines, newspapers, novels, articles, editorials, this section would be relatively easy for you. Having said that, the questions might be tricky, adding to the difficulty level of this section.
How tough is DILR?
DILR(Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning) is considered one of the toughest sections of CAT. To add to it, CAT has been constantly improving the standard of this section over the past 2-3 years. Hence, this section will consist of questions that are not so easy to solve, but on the brighter side, you do not need to solve all sets in this section. You need to choose the sets that you are comfortable with and that are not very complicated and make sure that you spend your forty minutes solving these sets. Again, the difficulty level may vary across aspirants based on their level of preparedness in this section. A good amount of practice would place you in a relatively comfortable position in this section.
How tough is QA?
QA (Quantitative Ability) focuses on your quantitative aptitude skills. If you are someone who is good with basic mathematics and know the concepts well, you will find this section easy. If your fundamentals are not strong, you will face 2 main challenges in this section, first, you won’t be able to solve a lot of questions, second, the questions that you solve will take a relatively longer duration of time, decreasing your marks/minute ratio. Hence, make sure that you get used to the underlying concepts and attempt a decent number of questions before you sit for the examination.
To know further about the toughness of each of these sections, we recommend you to take a look at the Previous Year CAT Papers. We also recommend you to take one free sectional each for each of the sections and 3 Free CAT Mocks to gauge the difficulty level of the CAT.
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Hope this article has helped you out in getting a basic idea about how tough CAT is. Wish you all the best in your CAT Preparation!
