CEED 2017 Exam Analysis by Experts

By Prasanna Gadkari

CEED 2017 Exam Analysis

Today more than ten thousand students aspiring to do their Master in Design appeared for Common Entrance Exam in Design, known as CEED in short. CEED is an entrance exam for Master in Design (MDes) at premium institutes in india, namely at IITs, IISc and UPES. Besides this CEED score is accepted for doing PhD at several universities in India. Followed by a good CEED scores, the candidates must clear an internal interview and studio test at the institute where they want to pursue their career. This course is coveted for many bright students, because under Modi’s Make-in-India inititive, a lots of well paying design jobs are cropping up. Since CEED is the stepping stone for the long journey into this creative field, today’s paper was a turning point in the career of many design aspirants.

CEED is divided into two parts: Part A, which comprises of objective questions and Part B, which tests design skills, such as sketching, creativity, logic, and ability to come up with innovative solutions. Part A is used as an elimination test, that is, a candidate has to clear Part A so that his/her Part B is taken up for evaluation. Essentially, IITB, which is the host for CEED, sets the scores of Part A in ascending order and selects the top ten percent for evaluation.

Read more: CEED 2017 Student Reaction

This year, the Part A consisted of three section, namely, 10 Numerical Answer Type (NAT) for 30 marks, 10 Multiple Select Questions (MSQ) for 20 marks and 25 Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ). Out of these, only MCQ had negative marking of 0.6 marks for every wrong answer, while unanswered questions did not fetch any marks nor incurred any penalty. The deviation from last year was that, this year the NAT did not have any negative marks. This means that the students can freely take a wild guess and the answer without being penalized.

CEED 2017 Part A Exam Analysis

This year, CEED Part A was peppered with some colour theory, fonts, logos and questions on painters, but was predominantly a paper in visualization and numerical aptitude. As expected, NAT was heavy on calculation, this year, an on-screen calculator was provided in upper right hand corner, a feature that was not advertised in the instructions, but was visible to observant eyes. A quick word with a number of candidates at the Pune centre revealed that not many of them were aware about this feature, but would have loved to use it, instead of relying on mental calculations.

Another major feature of CEED this year was that they published the syllabus for Part A. This made the matters a little easy than previous years, since the students did not require to meticulously prepare for general knowledge and design aptitude questions which would have likely seen in CAT paper! There was a general disappointment with the candidates about the shortfall of time for Part A and that there were lots of visualization question which taxed them even more. Especially candidates from engineering background, who crowd the CEED ranks, can breeze through the numerical and aptitude questions because of their training, and face a hard time with visual questions.

CEED 2017 Part B Exam Analysis

Part B was also a bit deviated from last year, in the sense that, it did not begin with the mandatory 50 marks sketching question. Instead it began with five 50 marks questions, out of which only one was to be attempted, and which were all from different streams such as product design, visual communication, animation, interaction design and mobility respectively.

This was followed by a question which needed to sketch either still life or a memory drawing about a banana vendor being chased by dog and a kid on tricycle watching, which surprisingly carried only 20 marks.

Traditionally, CEED has been known to be a sketching heavy exam, but this year, it tested the conceptual development and creativity of the students more than the ability to sketch.

Following this question, was to sketch 5 creative uses of a bike helmet. This question carried a total of 20 marks. Many candidates found this question to be quite difficult, perhaps, because of the lengthy questions which followed this. To finish the paper, candidates were needed to compose two stories of 3 sentences each with the words “Mango”, “orphan” and “cycle shop”. This carried a total of 10 marks.

Overall the paper was bit difficult and the branch specific questions were quite lengthy as compared to previous years. While Part A drained the students with difficult aptitude questions, Part B burned them down with even tougher concept building and sketching questions. Also, many candidates were expecting a full length of 50 marks for the sketching questions, and had practiced a lot for it, were largely disappointed when such question carried only 20 marks and that too had a choice of two. Further to this, use of colors was prohibited in this question. In general, the CEED 2017 raises the bar even further for being challenging even for the candidates who were well prepared.

About the Author:

Prasanna Gadkari

Prasanna Gadkari is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. Along with a career in Product Design spanning over eight years, Prasanna has mentored hundreds of aspirants to reach their dream of doing Master in Design (M.Des) from IITs, IISc and NID. He runs TeaCupBlog, a place where he and other students share their tips and experiences on pro bono basis.