CAT: Verbal ability was tough, says students

BANGALORE: The sword hanging over the heads of nearly 1.85 lakh candidates who took the Common Admission Test (CAT) has finally dropped, with no blood lost. Nine MBA aspirants from across the country secured 100 percentile and 1,800 others scored 99 percentile and above.While there are no 100 percentilers from the city, Ravikiran Shastry, a software engineer, managed to score 99.99 percentile. “It is a great feeling, as I finally cracked it in my third attempt. I believe that CAT is now a test of your intelligence than the amount of preparation you put in,” he said adding that he has got calls from IIM - Kozhikode and IIM - Ahmedabad. “But I am looking at Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata,” said Ravikiran.Students and trainers alike felt that the verbal ability section was the hardest nut to crack. “I totally agree that it was the toughest section. IIMs want diversity in students. As engineering students find math easy, the verbal ability section was strengthened. At the end, accuracy saves the day, as the tendency to score more does not help,” said Vardan Nagar, who scored 99.93 percentile in his third attempt. He is eager to go to IIM - Kolkata. CAT scores are accepted by the 13 IIMs, the country’s premier institutes for management studies, and several others, including the Management Studies Departments in the National Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajay Arora, director, Triumphant Institute of Management Education (TIME), said that the results of CAT 2011 were on expected lines. “However, students told me that their marks from section two were not up to their expectations. Students sometimes are not the best judges to decide that. However, it is disappointing that the IIMs have not come out with the shortlists, as percentiles become secondary when one looks at where the student ended up,” he said.