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Vipra Shrivastava
Senior Manager - Content
Updated on Dec 5, 2016 12:44 IST

CAT 2016

About 1.95 lakh candidates across the country took the CAT 2016 on December 4, 2016.

The exam was scheduled from 9 am to 12 pm (first slot) and 2 pm to 5 pm (second slot).

It was speculated that the question paper will throw a surprise at the test-takers which was in the form of Geometry. In the QA section, higher weightage was allotted to Geometry than other topics.

CAT 2016 Analysis:

Here's section wise analysis of CAT 2016 exam from MBA expert Mikin Shah, ForesightSchool.

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Verbal : Moderate Difficulty Level. Emphasis on Reading comprehension, sentence sequencing and central idea. Difficulty level was average. The topics for RC passages were quite manageable. There were about 5 Non-MCQ questions. Average student could have attempted 18-20 questions while scholars could have gone upto 25-27.

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DI-LR : High Difficulty Level. Although easier compared to last year. Trick was to identify easier sets. For the easier sets, calculator proved to be very useful. It was easy to get lost and waste time in this section. An attempt of 10-12 questions will be sufficient to clear the sectional cut-off.

QA : Moderate to High Difficult Level. This was a well designed section. The surprise was  higher weightage of geometry questions. Challenge was to go through all questions as there were a lot of speed breakers. An attempt of 18-20 questions would have been optimum. However the sectional cut-off could be cleared with about 15 attempts.


Overall Difficulty Level : Moderate to High : Optimum attempts - 48 to 55.

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CAT scores are used for admission to 19 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and various other top B-Schools. Are you eligible for the IIMs? To know more, click on the image beside.

About the Expert: Mikin Shah is a serial topper. He cracked CAT in 2003 with 99.11 percentile score. He was ranked first in GCET 2004, 2009 & 2010. He topped CMAT 2012-13 and was ranked fifth in CMAT 2013-14. In 2015, he cracked CAT once again with 99.53 percentile. He is the co-founder and director at foresight school – an educational institute which specializes in entrance exams, MBA Tuitions and financial courses such as CFA.

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Vipra Shrivastava
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