CAT 2009 Goes Online By Amit Kale

Common Admission Test, more commonly know as CAT, is an entrance exam for admission into the post graduate and fellowship programs offered by various management institutions across India. Among these institutes, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are the most prestigious institutes who offer post graduate and fellowship programs. CAT percentile is also considered by many other B-schools for short listing the candidates for GD and PI. Typically the admission to most of the B-schools in India is done in three different phases. The first would be the entrance exam, then GD and PI. Nearly 2 Lakh students appear for CAT every year and less than ten thousand would get a call from IIMs. So most of the aspirants who appear for the CAT, think that it is impossible to get in to top 8000 who probably may grab an IIM call. But then one must understand that not all the students who pay the application fees and apply for CAT are completely serious about the exam.

Types of students who appear for CAT:

• Students with Casual Attitude: Many of the students take CAT just because somebody else is also appearing, or because it's a fad and once you graduate from IIMs you will get fat packages of salary. These people live in their own world and never realize the importance of the entrance exam.
• Students with lack of confidence: A huge number among the 2 lakh junk falls in this category. They do not believe in themselves and still want to get admitted in to the IIMs. The first thing you should have is confidence and belief in yourself. If you do not believe in yourself then how can you expect IIMs to believe in you and give you admission? They will not even bother about you if you do not have self confidence.
• Forced aspirants: In this category, the student is not interested but is forced to give CAT. He don't even target the IIMs saying "its not my cup of tea." But then if you see, most of the questions askedin CAT are based upon the topics which we studied in our school. You need not have to be genius inevery field to crack CAT.
• Serious but not focused: This category is of those students who are serious about CAT but are really scared and worried for nothing. Though if they wish they can do it, they waste their time in worrying about nothing.
• Serious & Focused: These are the students who give tough competition to every CAT aspirant. They know they can do it and work hard to achieve it. So the real CAT competition is among this category student only.

Now you decide for yourself, how many students fall in each category and in which category you fall and prepare accordingly.

CAT 2009

CAT 2009 is likely to be an online test similar to GMAT. This year they are planning to take an online test in the span of 10 days. Daily three slots will be there and the test will be conducted for ten long days. So in all 30 different tests will be conduct across India in the span of ten days. Every test shall have a different set of question paper. But then the difficulty level for each test would be more or less similar.

Advantages of online test:

• There will be more than 200000 aspirants who will appear for CAT 2009. Online test will save a lot of time for correcting the papers and give out the results.
• CAT is conducted only once in a year, may be once it become online aspirants will have a chance to appear for CAT for more than one time in a year.
• In a long run, the marginal cost to add a new aspirant to give the test will be lesser.

Disadvantages of online test:

• The test is conducted in the span of ten days and every day you will have three different slots, it means that there will be 30 different test papers at least. Though the authorities may take good care that the entire 30 question paper sets will have similar difficult level still there is a slight chance of partiality towards the aspirants.
• People who are from remote areas and do not have frequent access to internet, for them traveling to the test center would be a hindrance.
• Also those aspirants, who are well versed with internet and the advance technologies, will have an edge on the others.
• It will be difficult for the students to go back to the question which is left unattempted.
• In RC most of the students are habituated with underlining and circling important words or phrases, in online test it may not be possible.
• Also for the rough work, in a offline paper-pencil test, you can do it on the question paper itself but in online test it will be difficult.

CAT 2009 GOES ONLINE by Amit Kale of WriteYup.

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