CAT 2011 Test Pattern

Common Admission Test (CAT) is usually a two hour fifteen minutes test (2 hrs 15 mins.), comprising of three sections:

• Quantitative Ability (QA) - The questions are designed to stress more on reasoning skills of the candidates, rather than on their computational skills. The level of difficulty of this section is perceived to be higher because the questions are not only lengthy to read but at times require more effort in terms of understanding and solving.
• Data Interpretation (DI) - As the name suggests, this section presents data to the candidate in forms such as caselets, pie diagrams, bar graphs, etc and questions are set to evaluate the candidate’s skills at analyzing the given information. Data Sufficiency questions in this section are based on basic mathematics (at times Data Sufficiency is a part of the Quantitative Ability section).
• Verbal Ability (VA) - also includes Reading Comprehension (RC) - This section explores your understanding of the English Language and also tests you on Reasoning Skills. The questions in this section typically comprise sentence correction, sentence sequencing, verbal reasoning etc. CAT usually has 6-8 passages in the RC section, with an overall length of 4500 to 5500 words and about 50 questions to answer in a span of about 30 minutes. However this too can vary according to the level of difficulty of questions.

* Students are advised to take a note - CAT syllabus and test pattern keeps changing every year with number of questions varying between 60 to 150. Even the duration of the test is not fixed and keeps changing from 2 hours to 2.5 hours. CAT 2009 and CAT 2010 had 60 questions each divided into 3 sections with 20 questions each. The duration of CAT 2009 and CAT 2010 was 135 minutes each i.e. 2 hours 15 minutes. Additional orientation time of 15 minutes was provided to each student for getting themselves acquainted with the computer and how to use the system to answer questions. Though this was an optional time given to students.
CAT 2011 is also expected to have 60 questions. 60 questions divided into three sections with 20 questions each. Though in Verbal Ability (VA), around 10 to 12 questions are of Reading Comprehension (RC). From 2009 onwards, no marks are alloted to the questions and students can choose whichever questions they want to attempt depending on their understanding and knowledge.