MHCET First Day Analysis

The MHCET began all over the country today and while the exam has always been easy, this was probably easier than the earlier versions as well. There were several glitches - technical & otherwise- the biggest being the exam having only 4 options when the brochure of MHCET as well as the instruction sheet handed out before the exam clearly mentioned 5 options (should not affect a candidate much though). 

The 200 question exam is not divided by section but an approximate break-up of questions is provided below. 

Logical Reasoning: 85
Quant & DI: 55
Verbal Ability: 60


Detailed Break-up:-

Cut-Offs:- (these are rough estimates only and do not use these as targets)

The paper was definitely quite easy with only a handful of questions that could be termed as moderate-difficult. The English section, especially, was very easy.
Given that and the increased competition with several serious candidates attempting this (for JBIMS), we expect the top score to be possibly even top 170 (if the errors are suitably accounted for). The top score last year was 158.

Percentile-Score (these are estimates only and do not use these as targets)

99.99%ile - 177
99%ile - 147
95%ile - 128
90%ile -  116

Glitches during the exam:

The DTE for some reason has moved to Sify as the exam provider while TCS conducted it last year. They probably changed the vendor very late in the cycle which possibly might have driven the delayed applications as well. The hurried nature of the having a new provider conducting the exam showed in the sub-optimal exam experience that most people encountered. There were several errors in the questions (if you find yourself facing one, just attempt it and move on. No point asking the invigilator as he does not know anything) .

Most visual reasoning images required large amounts of horizontal scrolling and many questions had some portion of the text cut-off (if you face this on 15th, use the "Question Paper" option that previews all questions and refer to the specific question).

The interface itself was poor and difficult to navigate. It takes 3 seconds to move from one question to the next. You are starting with 140 minutes!!
While we have not been big fans of the TCS interface, Sify made TCS's interface look like a work of art.
In our center, the exam start was delayed by more than 30 minutes with 3-4 students having to switch computers 5 minutes into the exam.
It is also unclear why the switch was made given TCS has had a great track record of conducting exams well.

All in all, we hope the DTE fixes the issues for 2016!

CAT 2014: First Day Analysis & Cut-Offs

The CAT exam began today all over the country and after five years of the 60 question format, this was the first time the IIMs had put out a two section, 100 question format.

While difficulty level is subjective, most students will find this paper much easier than any of the recent CAT exams.
Quant was Easy. Most students will find this one of the easiest Quant papers in the last 15 years.
DI was time consuming but definitely not difficult.
The only section that could be classified as difficult was the LR one which had 2 out of 4 sets which were difficult.
Expect cut-offs to be quite high, especially in Sec 1.

Outside of the difficulty level, there were no surprises as such but widely expected topics such as Data Sufficiency, Phrasal Verbs, Fill in the Blanks & FIJ were all missing. Please note that this is only sharing one of the first slot experience and is possibly not representative of students' within the in different slots. All students within the same slot got the same set of questions.

A detailed analysis of the exam is provided below followed by the experience a student will go through before & during the exam. To practice for other MBA exams, click here for XAT | NMAT | SNAP | CMAT | MHCET | CAT 

Expected Cut-Offs:- 

Cut-off Score	Percentile
215+	99.9
176+	99
139+	95
121+	90
96+	80

Note; These are estimates only and it is recommended that you do not use it as targets. 

Section 1 Analysis:  Out of 50 questions, there were 34 questions on Quantitative ability and 16 on DI. Very similar to what was anticipated and given on the mock test of the IIM CAT. There were several sitters in the paper especially in Arithmetic and Numbers. DI had four sets with one on Tournaments. A serious candidate who spends 90 minutes here could have attempted 35+. 

Section 2 Analysis:  Out of 50 questions, there were 16 questions on RC across four passages with the passages of 450-550 words. And there is no highlighting feature. It is mentioned in the beginning of the exam itself that you will have RCs in four question blocks. Two of the RCs had only three questions together and the final question of each passage was isolated somewhere else in the paper. So do check for this before you believe you have completed your RC passage. There were very few specific detail questions and while many of them required a good understanding of the passages, they were easily doable. Logical Reasoning  had 16 questions across four sets. Surprising aspects was the low weight for pure Verbal ability topics such as Grammar, Fill in the Blanks and Vocab. CR had GMAT style questions on inferences and few on essence of short passages. There were 8 Parajumble questions with half of them being on sentence exclusion.