Aspiring students appearing for the common admission test (CAT) 2015 seeking admission to the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) were in for a few surprises on Sunday.
Approximately 2.19 lakh students had registered for the test this year, which is said to be the highest in the last six years. Many students found the verbal and quants section much easier than the logical reasoning (LR) and the data interpretation (DI) section.
Siddharth S, a student who appeared for the exam at a Pune centre said that that this year bought a lot of surprises in the exam. Many questions were based on reading comprehension and the latter 10 verbal were on non-MCQs. No grammar and vocabulary were seen in the paper. Although the section was not tough. Only the LR section was the difficult one.
The regional director of a coaching institute, Prashanth Nair voiced that out of 100 questions 33 of them did not have multiple choices which may have contributed to the level of difficulty in the paper. Another coaching institute professor, Hemang Pachmatia said that although the non-MCQs were time consuming, it tested the students on their actual knowledge instead of just guesswork.
Other than a few minor glitches, the test was conducted successfully across all centres. It was reported that the Chandivli centre faced a power failure for 10 minutes but the students were compensated. In some cases, the server crashed and in a rare case, a student's mouse stopped functioning which lead to wastage of time. However, the number of glitches were few as compared to previous years.