IIM's shortlisting process - Transparent and daft

Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, students had a very simple way of knowing whether they had aced CAT. If you get a call letter from one or more of the 4 (or 6) IIMs, you can take it that you had done well, else you would not know whether you had got 98th percentile or 42nd percentile. One could happily assume one had just missed out and continue with life.

Thanks to increased transparency, one now gets a percentile score, and a detailed description of the short-listing process. And in most of the cases, the shortlisting process has been spectacularly absurd. Most of the B-Schools give enormous weightage to undergrad scores, 10th standard marks and 12th standard marks. IIM Indore apparently gives 30%, 35% and 35% to these three.

India probably has more than 30 different boards, so how does 85% in one compare with 90% in another. The year-on-year fluctuations alone are huge. Back in the mid-90s, the cut-off for entering into BITS Pilani used to be a good indicator for how easy/tough that year CBSE boards were. In 1996 one would have secured admission into BITS with a score of 457/458 in CBSE class XII exams; in 1997 the corresponding number for 471/472. That is nearly 3% score inflation in one year there. Yours truly was among those who got a gloriously inflated score in 1997, which has helped me in all these admission criteria ever since. A year earlier and my score would have most certainly been lower than the 90% benchmark that gives one extra points.

In Tamil Nadu, it is difficult to score less than 92-93% in the class XII board exams if you are a serious candidate. So, a 93% here probably translates to a 80-85% level in CBSE exams. I am sure there are plenty of other states that follow score inflation as official policy.

As far as undergraduation goes, a CGPA of 8.5 (of 2000 vintage, just to be clear) in Computer Science at IIT Madras is worth way more than a 10 in most other departments. Back in the late 90's, only the top 50 JEE ranks could secure admissions into IITM Computer Science (the department had only 20 seats), and finishing as a median performer (theoretical CGPA of 7.0, practical CGPA of 8.4-8.5) in this group of 20 would be many notches above most other things. I was never even in the same league as these 20-odd guys, but I could tell by merely interacting with them that most were at least a notch or two ahead of all other IIT junta.

A CGPA is a relative metric, necessarily conveying a notion of rank rather than of score. So, comparing CGPA's across years/departments/colleges is fraught with risk.

So, this fetish for transparency has led these IIMs to frame daft shortlisting frameworks. The biggest gripe I have with the IIMs is that they know of all these nuances, they know that marks across boards are not comparable, they know that even marks across different departments in the same college mean different things. This is why they used to trust their own processes more. This is why we have CAT. The fact that they are willing to run roughshod over this CAT score is inexplicable.

Some of the IIMs take the CAT score on a percentile basis. This tells us that they see the difference between 99.9th percentile and 98.9th percentile as same as that of between 98.9th percentile and 97.9th percentile. And this is daft. There are few ideas that are more stupid than this.    In one way, they are communicating that they now care far less about their entry processes than they did before. This might not matter that much for the big boys - IIMs A, B and C (though they might lose out to global universities). Because they will continue to get first picks. But this dont-care attitude is still unfathomable.

The admissions committees understand Indian realities very well. They realize that there will be huge variances. They are smart enough to understand the unrealiability of the metrics they generate. As opposed to this sludge composite metric, they have a CAT score that conveys way more than it did 10 years ago.

Why have very smart people chosen to prioritize vague, unrealiable metrics over a refined metric they have created? This will probably be one of the great unanswered questions of the selection process. It defies reason.

Given a choice, I would take the late 90's process any day. At least one would not have this feeling that the process was frightfully unfair. We could all assume that they had their reasons, and that would be it.

What next after CAT

This piece was published in the Education Plus, The Hindu. The author, Rajesh Balasubramanian, is a director at 2IIM. 

Post CAT, candidates will go through a second round of testing, the most important component of which is the dreaded personal interview. Now is a good time to revisit some aspects of the interview, with particular stress on the key mistakes.

I don’t know what I want to do in life, let me just say I want to be an entrepreneur.

The staple answer to “What is your long-term goal?”, the entrepreneurship card seems like a wonderful answer, but could be a risky gambit as well. If you have a clear idea of what you want to do, have done some research about the industry, have a sense of how you can differentiate yourself and have something resembling a business model; then anchor your long-term vision around a new venture. However, an answer along the lines of “I want to start a new business and contribute meaningfully to society by providing employment to the deserving” is pure waffle.

In case you don’t know how to read, I can recount everything my CV says here.

Faced with the standard “Tell me about yourself”; too often answers recount all the facts of life, down to the 86.4 per cent scored in Class X. The interviewer has already seen your CV, he is buying some time before coming up with the next question by asking a ‘filler’ question. He is bored after interviewing all day and wants to hear something interesting. The last thing he wants to listen to is a re-recording of your resume. The personal questions are wonderful opportunities for you to make a case for your selection. Do not waste them by restating facts.

I got this far by being good at multiple choice questions, I can answer all questions with Yes/No.

In a post-match conference, an eager commentator asks the player of the match “They missed the run-out chance in the 37th over. You were playing scratchily till then, but really clicked on after that. Was that the turning point of the match.” The cricketer gave a deadpanned reply, “Yeah”, and stopped at that. The commentator has not really just asked a question; he is keen to start a conversation. And the ‘yeah’ killed that. Your interviewer’s approach is going to be similar. Bin the ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘good’ and other monosyllabic answers; and take some of the questions to show that you have a personality beyond your resume. You should take effort to drop into a ‘conversation’ mode in the interview, and not fall into the Question-Answer mode where you just rattle off answers.

I am smart and funny, just not so in an interview.

Even the most experienced candidates have interview-anxiety. The better interviewees are the ones who can conquer their anxieties within the first few minutes, have a dialogue with the professors and wear a smile even while exiting.

The interviewer wants to know whether you can articulate, and will test whether you can respond when put under pressure. Practise well for the interview, but do not lose your spontaneity or your wit. An ability to think on your feet and a polite smile can open the doors that hours of studying cannot.

Practise extensively prior to the interviews. Have a series of mock interviews done by experienced people. And bear in mind that, notwithstanding all this preparation something could still go wrong in the interview. Shrug off one or two bad answers and get back on track.

The writer is director at 2IIM, a coaching institute for CAT. He scored 100 percentile in

CAT 2012 and CAT 2011.

CAT Results - Best wishes from 2iim

CAT results are out this week. To begin with, best wishes for all the students who have taken up this exam. Over the past few days, we have got a few calls from students who are facing results-anxiety. So, this is probably a good time to get some perspective. A few thoughts -

1. The biggest business houses in this country were built by non IIM grads. A degree from one of the IIM's  is a great route to take a big leap, but is not a necessary (nor is it sufficient) condition for success in business.

2. There are probably 40 good colleges in the country now. When we guys wrote CAT 10-12 years ago, there were probably 6 worthwhile colleges to do an MBA from. Now, the anything in the top 40 can give you a boost. If you get 99th percentile and get a call from 4 IIMs, great. If you get 95th percentile, you should still feel good that you are in the top 5 percent in the country. Shoot for the best, but best to be pragmatic as well.

3. If you miss the bus now, there is always next time: India now has plenty of options for doing an executive MBA. This option is open for candidates with 5-6 years of experience. Now, there is also a chance that CAT might be conducted more than once a year. So, there is always next year. Some of our students have cracked CAT at the fifth attempt. So, if you are in the close-but-no-cigar category, probably best to lick your wounds and come back next year.

Once again, best wishes to the guys.  

Get CAT Savvy - From the Hindu

Have given below the article published on Education Times of the Hindu. The piece was written by Rajesh Balasubramanian, director at 2iim. The article can be found here

Get CAT Savvy

Everyone gets nervous before a key exam. I took my 5th CAT last year, 11 years after my first CAT and 9 years after finishing my MBA from IIM Bangalore. And, I was nervous. You are not alone in having that vague anxious feeling. The key to a high-powered performance is to convert this nervous energy into positive adrenaline rather than just something that bogs you down. Plan to fly off the blocks.

If you get consumed in the paper in the first 10 minutes, then chances are that you will remain switched-on throughout. Don’t think about the overall paper; or even the section for the first 20-25 minutes. Think like Virendra Sehwag. He is the kind of guy who might be beaten three balls in a row and hit the next three for boundaries.

Take one question at a time. If you want to imagine someone who appears even cooler under pressure, think Usain Bolt.

In the last few weeks prior to an exam, the biggest challenge facing students concerns balancing the several demands placed on them. It is easy to lose focus and feel overwhelmed by it all. One needs to guard against this, while simultaneously working on the many moving parts without. Let us focus on a few key competing demands and realign our priorities.

 

Learning & consolidation

Now is the right time to give up on some of the vague topics. In the last few weeks, plan to optimize your performance. Do not spend too much time learning new stuff from now on. Picking obscure questions from non-descript websites and obsessing over them should be avoided. How you optimize your performance in the exam is far more important than getting some odd detail right. To give you an analogy - If you are an opening batsman about to represent India in the world cup and realize that your follow through after a cover drive needs correction. What would you do? Enroll yourself for a six-week session with batting guru or forget about it and focus on more immediate things?

Now is the time to plant seeds so that your brain can pick standard things much quicker. Don’t load it with new information. If you can train your mind to pick standard spelling errors, standard Pythagorean triplets in the actual exam, you will be better off for it than if you studied about the Oxford comma.

This is where practice exams come in very handy. They teach you to become exam savvy without agonizing over every detail. Take plenty of practice exams, and fill the gaps in learning based on the feedback you get from these.

 

Taking tests

A simple thumb-rule to keep in mind - Spend at least as much time reviewing a mock CAT as you spent taking it. And when you are reviewing a test focus on these three things — what are the ones that I skipped that I have attempted, more importantly, what are the questions that I have tried that I should have skipped, and what is the solution to these questions that I have missed? Do not analyze percentiles, rankings, etc.

Never take two tests in a day. Do not plan to take more than four tests per week. Your mind is not a machine. It needs time to recover. If you are ready to take a mock CAT within 4 hours of having finished one, the simple truth is that you have not thrown enough into the mock CAT.

 

Intense learning vs. Taking rest

You cannot prepare for 12 hours a day for CAT. This is not an exam where low-intensity-warfare type of preparation pays off. This is an exam where how sharp you are when you take an exam matters more than how much you know. There is no point increasing the knowledge base if your brain goes AWOL for 15 minutes during an exam. And you can take CAT for 140 minutes with intensity only if you are well rested.

Sleep a lot. Eat well. Drink a lot of fluids.

 

The day before the exam

The day before the exam, find a routine that relaxes you well. Do not get too many inputs from any 'expert'. Put your feet up, watch some sitcom or sports on TV, sleep early and be physically and mentally ready.

The odds of learning something in the last 24 hours that will be of use in the exam are very low. On the other hand, a sharp mind might bail you out in three questions, which might make a difference of four percentile points. 

Optimism vs. Pragmatism

Carry the belief that you can crack this into the exam hall. But have the prudence to have a plan B and the maturity to know where you stand. Getting 98th percentile might not get one a call from the IIMs these days, but if you rank in the top two percent in the country that is something to feel happy about. It is important to keep your expectations reasonable.

 

Other options

Another aspect that will keep you relaxed is the belief that everything does not ride on this one day, one exam. Don’t burn your bridges at office; do not throw away a job offer because you are anyway going to do an MBA. Do not ignore XAT after CAT gets over. Apply to colleges beyond the IIMs.

A great many things that I have mentioned here are easier said than done. As a student, I had forgotten to apply to FMS, had taken up XAT in an overconfident daze, had slept during an exam while doing MBA and have generally committed all the mistakes stated above at some point of time or other. Don’t put undue pressure on yourself. If CAT 2012 goes well, great. If it doesn’t, keep in mind that a majority of the successful businesses in our country are run by people who did not do their MBA from an IIM. 

Best wishes for CAT

Mock CAT Questions EOK, GOK and NYK

This is a post slightly tangential to CAT preparation, so skip this if you are lookiong for serious CAT preparation posts. Quite a few students get thrown off by some different/ambiguous questions presented in different forums. These can be categorized in three categories.

EOK: Examiner-only-knows
Let me give you an example. A bell tolls once every 20 seconds, another tolls once every 30 seconds. If both of them ring at the same time, how many time will they ring togrther in thr first hour?

Now, they will ring together once every minute. But the cheap-tricks-of-examiners book says that the answer for this question can be 61 instead of 60. You can answer this question only if you know the examiner. Sometiem you cannot answer it even if you know the examiner. These are the Examiner-Only-Knows questions

The next category is GOK:
Let me give you a sample. The difference between the lengths of the diagonals of a paralleogram inscribed in a circle is 2 cms, fidn the area of the parallelogram.

Now, a parallelogram inscribed in a circle has to be a rectangle. And the diagonals of a rectangle are equal. So, it is clear that even the examiner does not know the answer to this one. God Only Knows - GOK

The third category is intersting. And this is probably the most useful as well. This is the Now-you-now category
There was/is a legendary professor of organic Chemistry named Govindarajan in Chennai who used to train students for the JEE in the 80's, 90's and 00's. He was an elderly gentleman even in the late 90's, and wonderful as he was in teaching, he was also laidback about exams, scores, records, performance-trackers and the like. After one of his famous exams - bunch of students had some issues with the paper because it had some questions being beyond what he had taught in class. (Imagine 17-year olds anxious to tell themselves they messed up only because they hadnt been thought that bit). He looked at said questions "I did not teach you this?! You did not know about this?" with an incredulous look on his face. This slowly gave way to a wry smile and he said "Well, well, well. Now You Know."

There will always be Now-you-know questions in exams. Stuff that you did not know before, but is probably an important tidbit.

Try this one - A six-digit number N of the form 'abcabc' where a, b, and c are digits from 0 to 9 has exactly 16 factors, how many values can N take?

If you know that a number 'abcabc' is 'abc' * 1001 and that 1001 = 7 * 11 * 13, this question becomes easy. If you do not know this and you see this in a mock CAT paper, it is probably a good time to say "Now I know" (after you review the paper):)

This is why it is important to aggressiely review your mock CATs and not just fixate on the percentiles.

Mock CAT - How to select the right questions?

Knowing how to traverse through a paper is an important skill-set in the CAT. This is particularly true of the computer-based version, as in the paper-based versions one has to luxury of  choosing the order of the sections, sub-sections etc while attempting a paper. Let us look at a few aspects in this post

1. Question selection has to be dynamic: A student does not have the luxury of saying "let me look at the questions in different categories and figure out which ones work best for me." The decision-making will have to be on the fly. This is why sections like DI and LR work as 'fillers'. If quant is tough, one has to look at cracking DI to anchor the section. Similarly, if 2 RC passages are vague, one needs to get all 9-10 correct in LR.


2. One needs to have an intuitive sense of each section: One should have a particularly clear idea of questions by sub-category. For instance, if you are at question number 20 in quants, you should know the exact number of DI questions that have gone by.

One of the more common (and  stupid) exclamations of surprise after CAT is usually along the lines of "I got a stinker. The last 10 questions were from RC". You did not see an RC passage till question number 20. What did you expect the last 10 questions to be?

I am going to use a cricket metaphor here. Taking CAT is like chasing in a ODI match. Think of all the good chasers there - Javed Miandad, Dhoni, Bevan. You can bet your bottom dollar that these guys would have known exactly how many overs were left for the first/second bowlers and the fifth bowler. You can take it for granted that by over no 30, a batsman like Dhoni would have already 'alloted' n runs to be taken from the 6 overs from the non-regular bowler.

Imagine  a post-macth interview where Dhoni says, we could have got 40 off the last 5 overs, but unfortunately three of those were bowled by Dale Steyn. 

3. You should be able to gauge the difficulty level of the paper and plan accordingly: I am going to continue with the cricket metaphor here. If you are batting first, it is silly to plan for 300+ score if it is a very tough track. Equally important to not 'play' for 220 runs on a 280 track. A great many students end up being conservative with their targets when the paper is too easy. In some sections in CAT, you will be in a position to attempt 26-28 questions. In these you should be setting the bar high. As a simple rule of thumb, one should hit the range of ~21 questions per section to hit 99th percentile. (It goes without saying that there are lots of caveats to this rule). And when in doubt assume that the paper is easy.

4. Leave well, leave early: Carrying on with the cricket metaphor here (suddenly realized that there are quite a few parallels :) ). As for the first round of attempts is concerned, if you do not get the method straight away, skip the question. When you are taking mock CATs and analyzing them, have a good luck at questions that took you spent more than 4.5 minutes on and figure out how you got suckered into these. If you take 8 minutes for a question, it hardly matters whether you got it right - its a bad call. Beat these time-sinks down aggressively.

5. Everyone needs the odd confidence-booster: Lets face it, skipping all dicey questions is good in theory, but it does make one nervous. And sometimes, every now and then you will find yourself in a position where you have skipped 4 in a row and then you face a time-consuming, boring question in linear equations. In order to get your confidence going, you might have to set aside 4.5 minutes to crack this. This is ok.

6. Start well:  Lots of guys start sluggishly and then start sweating by the end of 10th minute. Plan to fly off the blocks with feverish intensity. You cannot go much wrong with that strategy.

To complete with a cricket metaphor. Start like Sehwag, finish like Dhoni. Go berserk in the first few minutes, turn savvy (calculating) half way through the paper.

Best wishes for CAT 2012. 

Get, set, go - From "The Hindu"

This is an article from "The Hindu" contributed by the director at 2iim, Rajesh Balasubramanian

 CAT 2012 will be conducted from October 11 to November 6 this year. A number of candidates will be fine-tuning their preparation right now, while others will be looking to somehow kicking the inertia out of the system and starting their preparations in right earnest. We provide a plan of action for the latter group.

Do not tell yourself it is too late to start now. Do not listen to anyone who says that there isn’t enough time for preparation. Till about 10 years ago, students used to start their CAT preparation only in August (very reluctantly, I must add). The basic syllabus for this exam roughly corresponds to Maths and English taught in class VI- IX. So, if the fundamentals are reasonably strong, a student should require only 200-300 hours of preparation for this exam.

What should be the plan of action? With the Olympic spirit in mind, let us think of this preparation as a parallel to an athlete preparing for the Olympics. Divide your preparation into three phases.

Do the grind

In phase I, cover the basics for all the topics in quant. Solve as many questions as possible. This is the phase where one builds on first principles and gets the mind ready for the tougher battles ahead. For the verbal section, set aside two hours every day to reading. Read lots of stuff and with as much variety as possible.

The topic, style, subject and size do not matter (Fiction, non-fiction, sports, politics, economics, science, anything goes). Just build the reading habit and get the mind ready to receive written content. This phase is similar to an Olympic wrestler/badminton player spending hours in the gym. This phase should go on for about six weeks.

Build intensity

Start building intensity. Take section-wise tests, set yourself targets for sets of 15, 20 or 30 minutes. Start practicing for Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning. Increase the intensity steadily by mixing up topics and setting varying time targets. This is the phase where you should select one DI bunch, one LR puzzle, two passages in RC, eight questions in Number Theory and set yourself 50 minutes of high intensity preparation. This is akin to an athlete training muscle by muscle and play-by-play. This is probably the part of CAT preparation that is heavily underestimated. People who are used to spending 10 hours in office or eight hours in college think that writing a 2 hour 20 minute-exam cannot be that taxing. Taking a test for 140 minutes without concentration “drops” is challenging and will not come without getting the mind ready for it. The better you do this the less tired you will get handling regular questions in CAT and more energy you will have for handling tougher ones. This should go on for about four weeks.

Fine tune your preparation

Phase III is simple. Take mock exams. Analyze them vigorously. Plug whatever gaps you find by revisiting phase I or phase II. And when you analyze a paper, you should focus on what kind of questions you have gotten wrong, which ones you should have attempted but have skipped, which ones took time without giving you much in return, which questions should you have skipped straightaway, etc. Do not waste time on studying percentile patterns and such. Most mock CAT percentile scores are nothing more than a distraction. This should ideally go on for about five weeks. This is the phase where the athlete simulates match conditions, studies opponents, figures out the draw, etc.

Phase I, II and III could overlap. If you plan well and are willing to throw in lots of time toward preparation, this can be done in 10 weeks. The students with intense shorter-term preparation have seen better results than those who enroll into long-term courses but do not do justice to them.

For those who have been preparing for a while, the strategy is simple. Skip Phase I. Kick start your preparation now and focus on building intensity. Best wishes for CAT 2012.

The author, a B-school trainer, is one of the CAT toppers last year with 100 percentile. He takes CAT every year to understand the pattern and help his students better.

Do's and Dont's when taking Mock CATs

Do's

The easy ones first 1) Make sure you take plenty of them and 2) Take them as seriously as possible. Mimic exam settings  well. Now, on to the others

1) Focus on building intensity: Make sure you reduce your concentration lapses as possible. Very often we forget the intensity-building aspect of Mock CATs. It just becomes a routine exercise because you are chalking up the numbers. Most students have 2 spells of 7-9 minutes where nothing gets done. You need to beat this down aggressively

2) Analyze to death: Do not analyze percentile trends or some such artificial nonsense. You should be able to answer these questions - a) How many errors are from guesses, how many from 'silly errors' and how many from being caught out by the question. More importantly, how many errors were due to fatigue b) What are my 'strong' topics/question types. How come I am making mistakes in these? c) Identify 3 questions in each section where you spent too much time on and improve question selection d) Am I selecting the right questions (this is a whole new topic, we will have a separate post on this) e) How many questions that have been 'skipped' were do-able?

3) Try out different strategies: The mock CAT series is to find a pattern that works for you. With the exam being online, going sequentially is the best strategy to approach. But still one needs to know when to do RC, LR and DI within the two sections. Have a broad outline (like early in the paper or late in the paper), and flirt with 1-2 other patterns



Dont's

1) Dont take the percentile scores seriously: The percentile you got in the 3rd mock CAT of the Alpha test series counts for pish tosh. So, chuck that. This percentile is one of the most misleading statistic around. Very often students get into a fall comfort zone if the percentiles are going in the right direction. There is no single provider in the country who has managed to mimic CAT well. So, if you are doing better and better at Alpha test series, chances are that you have cracked the "Alpha" series well. So, go and try a few in Beta and Gamma test series. The number of students who consistently score 99th percentile in a test series and find themselves in no man's land in when actual CAT scores come along is very high.


2) Do not depend on only one provider for Mock CATs: Mix it up. Dont fall into a comfort zone with one style of questioning. Make sure you are tested under a different setting. Friends can even pool together, get an id 

3) Do not take 2 mock CATs in a day in order to increase your mock CAT count: It is meaningless to take mock CATs when you are tired. And you are kidding yourself if you have taken a mock CAT, analyzed it and are not tired at the end of it.

Best wishes for CAT 2012. Now that the dates have been announced, it is probably a good time to crank up your preparation.

P.S: The best mock CAT series in the market is provided by 2iim :). This is the team that publishes on this blog and specializes in giving objective inputs.

Jokes apart,  2iim offers a 10 online tests series @ Rs, 1350. All content prepared by alumni from IIM A, B and C with each test having expert feedback from CAT 2011 100th percentiler.   More details can be obtained here .

CAT preparation - Is it ok to start preparation in June?

The short answer is Yes.

The syllabus covered for CAT is very straightforward. Maths syllabus is equivalent to what is seen in 6th to 9th standard text book, and basic reading comprehension and sentence structures in English. The exam is tough because the questions are very application-intensive and because there are ~2 lakh people fighting for ~6000-12000 good seats

An aspirant can start by June, comfortably finish all the portions by August, or latest early September, take 20 mock CATs and be ready for CAT by November. This exam is as much about momentum and intensity as it is about knowledge or application. The intensity with which one prepares in the last lap will be a bigger determinant than how long you have been poring over basic formulae.

So, why do people start 12-months before CAT?

This trend of starting 12 or 15-months before CAT started recently. When I took my CAT, we guys used to start preparing in August (reluctantly). Now, I took my CAT in 2000 and back then the CAT exam was in December. But even adjusting for that, we guys used to prepare for barely 3-3.5 months. But we threw in a lot in that final lap. Many of my friends hit 30 mock CATs before the exam. Back then 70% of preparation used to be about taking practice exams. (Most of us would have been shocked if someone had asked us to prepare for percentages for 5 weeks)

The most important driver for this change has been the development (over-development) of the test-preparation industry. It really helps the industry if college-goers start enrolling themselves for courses 12 or 18 months before the exam. Less than 5% of this brigade takes the exam seriously. Any trainer will tell you that the longer term batches are the worst preparing. Students start missing classes and denude themselves into believing that they are geared merely because they started very early. 12 months into the course, the average attendance levels are less than 10% and when the time is perfect for starting preparation, these long-term and uber-long term batches lose all momentum.


I am starting preparation now, what should be the plan?


To start with, do not tell yourself you dont have a chance because you are starting late. Cover topic by topic for maths for the next ~8 weeks. Read something for at least an hour each day. Spend 2-4 hours each week on DI and/or LR. Run this schedule for ~ 8weeks during which time you should have also taken 2-3 mock CATs. In this first phase, do not worry about time pressure, speed, overall percentiles, etc.

By middle of August, you would have seen most question types, and covered most topics in quant. From here on, take one mock CAT every week and fill whatever gap areas you have. Identify gap areas based on your own gut feel and from what the mock CATs tell you. Have this as the plan for the next 6 weeks. During this phase, you should start building intensity. Plan part tests and exercises in short bursts. Mix up topics and ensure that you avoid concentration lapses. You should create a package like 10 questions in Number Theory, 3 selected passages from Economist, TIME and NYtimes, one DI grid and one LR puzzle from the web in 45 minutes and test yourself at breakneck speed. This phase is like strengthening muscle by muscle before a tournament.

Final few weeks, take mock CAT, review mock CAT aggressively. Repeat. Fill gaps if they still crop up and be as relaxed as possible.

I started preparation last November, what should I do now?
This is quiet simple. Restart now. Create a plan to aggressively ramp up intensity.

CAT is going to become an on-the-fly testing exam - What does this mean and what are the implications?

CAT has seen quite a few changes recently. It turned online in 2009, it turned online without glitches in 2010 (could not resist the dig even though I think the CAT is a great exam), became a partial linear on-the-fly exam in 2011 and could soon become a round-the-year exam. Now, what does all this mean, and what are the implications?

What does this mean? 

A fixed form method of testing is a method of testing where all applicants write the same exam, get to see the same set of questions and are given percentile-based scores after the scores are computed. An on-the-fly exam is a paper where different candidates are given different questions but overall percentiles are calculated post normalizing the scores for varying levels of difficulty (on a per-question basis). A completely on-the-fly exam would probably be one where questions are dynamically selected from a database based on some dynamically changing parameter(s). This changing parameter is usually the candidate's performance in the exam up to that point. This is popularly known as the adaptive testing model.

Why this shift from fixed-form testing to on-the-fly testing?

To start with, the fixed form testing is simpler. One paper for all applicants ensures fair testing, removes randomness, and provides an ideal benchmark. But it has certain constraints - two very important ones stand out.

1. The most important is the fact that it is difficult to design an exam that tests the varying levels of capability of a large applicant pool. Because it is a single instance exam, it can become too tough for a section of the audience so there is no real metric to distinguish between 60th percentile and 20th percentile. On the other hand, it might be too easy for the top quartile, so there is not much to choose between someone who scored 90th percentile and 99th percentile barring a few details here and there. Now, CAT is under pressure to make a distinction between top 0.1 percent and top 1 percent, top 1 percent and top 3 percent, top 3 percent and top 10 percent and so on. A single instance exam can never give you that kind of fine-tuning.

2. The exam happens only once a year. The logistical challenge is significant. More importantly, students find it difficult to take/prepare for this exam.

The on-the-fly test removes both these constraints (at least partly). 

Sod all this technical discussion, what does this do to my preparation?

This is the key factor. This change in testing algorithm alters a few key aspects of preparation, especially practice test-taking. Some conventional ideas get turned on their head.

1. Selecting the easy questions and getting them might not take you all the way: One needs to select the easy questions and get them right, there is no doubt about this. But, very often you will find that this alone is not enough (especially to step up from the 96-97th percentile range). Questions from any CAT paper can be broken into three bunches -

Easy - About 12-14 questions from each section
Do-able but not bleeding obvious - 8-10 from each section
Tough ones, either conceptually or because they are time consuming - 6-8 ones

Because of the differential marking built into the system, any student is going to get rewarded more for getting a few of the tougher ones correct. So, every easy question needs to be nailed. But beyond this, students need to get a majority of the middling ones and at least 2 of the tough ones. Otherwise you will be knocking on the neither-here-nor-there 96th percentile range. It is important to learn the tougher topics from first principles. So, one needs to be either conceptually sound so that you can hit the tricky ones, or frightfully quick so that you can hit the time-consuming ones. Just skimming and doing all simple questions well will just take you close (but no cigar)

2. Need to focus on how well you are selecting questions in your mock CAT series. However, as a candidate you must not only focus on how many easy ones you missed, but also think about how many of the trickier ones you should equip yourself to tackle.

Your score is going to depend not only on how many questions you attempted, but also how you did on the tougher ones. Simply skipping the tough questions in each topic will make sure that you never cross a certain threshold as far as your score goes.

What should one do?

Preparation plan does not change much. Take many mock CATs. Whenever you are analyzing a mock CAT, see if there are some questions that you should have attempted but could not. Revisit the theory to re-equip yourself. Post every mock CAT, you should revisit the topics to plug the gaps.


What should one not do?

Please do not take mock CAT scores seriously. Mock CAT percentiles are one of the most misleading statistics in all of CAT preparation. Take plenty of mock CATs to get a feel for the exam. But please do not take the percentiles seriously. There are too many students who consistently score 99th percentile in one or the other mock CAT series, but end up with a 95th percentile in the overall scheme of things. There is no great mock CAT series provider out there in the market who has managed to capture all the moving parts. Take mock CATs from more than one provider. Get the experience. But do not take the scores seriously.

Product plug alert!!. You can get details of the mock CAT series of 2iim here.

Most people would be starting their CAT preparation at about this time. We often get asked whether the time is sufficient. I will give a further blog post on this, but the short answer is "Yes". Most definitely Yes. 
 

CAT Aspirants from IITs - What should be the plan?

Had been to a panel discussion on "cracking CAT" held at IIT Madras. Some interesting points were discussed. Just thought it would be a good idea to share those. Lot of the stuff pertains to an IIT audience; hence the title. Having said that most of what we discussed would apply to anyone who is strong in quants and is slightly worried about verbal.

For IIT-ians it is probably a better idea to NOT enroll into a course 15-months before CAT

Till 2000 (the year I took CAT), preparation for CAT used to start at the beginning of the 7th semester, roughly 4 months before CAT (back then CAT used to be held in Dec). Then the CAT training industry happened and preparation cycles expanded - slowly inexorably, painfully to 15-months. This kind of preparation cycle kills momentum - especially for IIT-ians.

Most CAT courses focus on quant preparation. So, if it is a 180-hour classroom program, then 120+ hours will be on quants. The quant-level tested in CAT corresponds to syllabus from standard VI to IX. So, your teacher will be discussing profit&loss and linear equation for most parts - several notches below JEE preparation. Odds are that you will enrol for the course in a bout of enthu and start skipping classes from month 2 onwards, and completely forget about the course by month 4. Empirical data suggests that this is what 90% of IIT junta do. Whats the point?

IIT-ians quant level will be higher. You will not get much value from sitting in a class that teaches basics. You need good-quality practice and may be some discussion with a teacher who can push you that little bit further. Cracking CAT is about momentum, intensity, sharpness. Many graduates across the country need help with geometry, number theory or permutation & combinations. But if one has cleared JEE, one should have little trouble navigating quants.

The second section is a verbal section, not an English section

Among IIT-ians, the general feeling of unease regarding this 'second section' is very high. English is not a comfort-zone area for a lot of "quants" guys. Bear in mind that this section is a verbal section, not an English knowledge section. This is just another framework to test how sharp you are. That you are strong in a quantitative framework need not imply that you should be at a disadvantage when it comes to non-quantitative framework.

Worldwide, examinations are designed with a simple quant + simple verbal framework only because this is considered a good proxy to test intelligence. This is why the tests focus on averages,percentages and the like (rather than differential calculus and vector algebgra). Correspondingly, for the verbal section the focus is on reading comprehension and basic reasoning, and not on identifying past-participle and gerund.

The JEE is a good exam only because it is a great signal of intelligence. If you have cleared it, then you should tell yourself "If I am good enough to have the smarts to clear a very tough quant-framework exam, I should be good enough to clear a far-simple non-quant framework exam".

Looking at it another way - one-third of verbal is Logical Reasoning, which should be straightforward. One-third is stuff like Sentence Rearrangement, Paragraph Completion and the like - for which there should be no particular advantage to any group of students. And the final third is reading comprehension - which does not require specific English knowledge as all questions are going to be based on the passage itself.

So, IIT-ians do not need to enrol in a course, need not bother with excessive quants preparation, the verbal section is also easy - so, does it mean they just cool their heels and go for the CAT exam?

Of course not. Just have a different schedule for preparation. Make sure bulk of preparation is based on tests for the quantitative subjects and not based on a classroom course pegged at a very mild benchmark. As for the verbal section goes, there is ONLY ONE THING that IIT-ians need to do (for that matter, anyone needs to do) - Read. Students' ability to get the crux of a 300-word editorial is fairly poor. And this is an essential skill-set. This does not get built with so called RC practice. Comfort level with comprehension is built by reading, and pretty much nothing else. Read lots, read lots of different stuff. Read from magazines, websites, sports sites, newspapers, fiction, non-fiction, editorials. It does not matter what you read, or from where you read.

Beyond this, take practice exams, fill the gaps in quant, DI and LR. Work on intensity and stamina. Do not fall into the guilt-trap and enrol yourself into a course 15-months ahead of the exam and kid yourself saying you are preparing for CAT.

CAT 2012 - Thoughts based on CAT 2011

CAT scores are now out, and this is a good time to think about what we have seen from the results. We had published something similar post CAT 2010. Many of the takeaways mentioned in that post hold good now as well.

Opinions that have been reinforced

First-principles based preparation is a must.
We had discussed this last year as well. Almost all questions are application-intensive, and few can be answered using a blanket-formula. So, forget the shortcuts and the word-lists, learn from the basics. This means that if you are going to a coaching center for aiding your preparation, it is important to go to a place where the quality of teachers is very high. Oversimplified preparation can take you till 75th percentile, but not any further

Journey from 90th to 95th percentile is tough. 95th to 98th and beyond is tougher still.
This bit is obvious, but still important because one needs to get a reality check before pinning all hopes on CAT. If you have given it your all and ended with 85th percentile. It is probably time to refocus, aim for a 95th percentile and join some good college once you get that. The number of good B-Schools in India tops 50 and a 95th percentile could still get you a great college. Also, when you are preparing for CAT, do the basics well and early, make sure you have enough quality to hit 90th percentile-ish consistently, and then restart and fine-tune preparations for the final climb. Do not sit back and do the same things over and over again.

Importance of good profile has gone up
You would have heard stories of how someone who had flunked n papers in engineering managed to get an admit in IIM Cal in spite of all this. That era is slowly disappearing. You can no longer say - "I have skeletons up my cupboard and in order to get away from that I want to do an MBA" (I know that feeling. I had that same feeling 10 years ago :-)). Focus on academics, clear that paper you hate, make sure you do well in your job. All those things matter. And all those things matter more now than they ever did.

New pointers from CAT 2011

Reading is uber-critical
We cannot over-emphasize this point. The guys who have the reading habit have a healthy advantage in CAT. Not only the RC section, almost the entire verbal section barring LR are going to be far easier for guys who have a habit of reading. Importantly, these sections are getting tougher to prepare for. There is no great way to "practice" for sentence rearrangement, paragraph completion, word usage, or fill-in the blanks. These are not grammar dependent, not vocab dependent. Ability to sift through these types of questions gets built with months of reading practice. So, if you have CAT in mind, set yourself a target of reading for at least 2 hours each day. Forget everything else, this alone will improve your score significantly. Read anything. What you read matters less than how much you read.

Cracking LR is a hygiene factor now
For guys not extremely comfortable with English, the thinking behind the verbal section goes like this - "If I can crack all 9-10 questions in LR and get some 5-6 other questions correct, I should be through." Good point. Some merit in this. But remember, a lot of people are going to go with the same strategy. Merely cracking LR will still leave you with too big a gap to bridge. Some of our students who cracked LR out of shape ended with 80th percentile-ish in verbal. Not bad at all. But if you want to climb above 90th percentile, you need to get going in the English section as well.

On the lighter side, age is not a barrier for cracking this exam
As someone who teaches for CAT, I hate it when people tell that they have been out of touch of math and have not studied maths for n years (especially when n is less than 5). One of the guys at 2iim got 100th percentile in CAT 2011 and he is on the wrong side of 30. So, there is no excuse for guys with 5 years experience telling themselves they are out of touch with math. For solving questions on percentages and averages, you do not need to be a 20-something :-)

Best wishes from 2iim for your interview preparation.

Top B-Schools and other related questions

This is the time when we get to hear a lot of questions on how to apply, where to apply, which exams to write, etc.

Let us start with B-school rankings. Like all the best rankings, we have come up with our own way of handling this. Unlike the best rankings, we have not conducted a survey to create some data to validate what we wanted to put anyway. If you want a really phony survey, refer to the outlook one. If you want a reasonable honest decent one, the pagalguy one is good. If you want a survey that does not even want to pretend to be anything but an advertising campaign, look for anything with IIPM top 10 in it.

Anyway, on to our own list. We have just categorized the colleges into three tiers.

Tier I
Based on CAT: IIMs A, B, C, L, I, K, SPJain, MDI, NITIE, Bajaj
Based on XAT: XLRI
Other: ISB, FMS,

Tier II
Based on CAT: IIMS - Ranchi, Rohtak, Raipur, Trichy, etc. Symbioisis SIBM, NMIMS, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, TISS, TAPMI, IIT Kanpur,
Based on XAT: XIMB
Other: SCMHRD,

Tier III
Based on XAT: KJ Somaiyya, Goa Institute of Management, XIME, LIBA
Other: Great Lakes, Other Symbioses. BIM, etc.

Needless to say, this list is indicative and highly subjective. This is not much more than a starting point for students to do research.

Exams to write
Anyone interested in MBA should definitely take up CAT, XAT and FMS. Other exams to consider are SNAP, MICAT and any regional exams. JMET is no longer included because entry into the IITs is going to be through the CAT from this year onwards.

How to choose elective/specialization
To start with, there is no hard and fast specialization in most MBAs. A degree in MBA-Finance is not like a BE Civil engineering degree. A student can specialize in finance and/or marketing or neither and still get a job in P&G or ICICI. Thumb rule while applying to companies is this - If you are applying to P&G call yourself a marketing guy, if you are applying to Goldman Sachs call yourself a fin guy. So, do not worry about specialization till you join college. You wont have to worry about this till you start your second year if you are doing a two-year course.

Which college is best for marketing/fin/HR, etc?
Specialization brands have not yet come up in India (They are not such a big deal globally either). Go for the better college, do not sweat over specialization. The only colleges known for something different are
XLRI- HR
NITIE - Ops
MICA - Advertising

And even these are not too clearly defined.

Best wishes for the entrance exam season

Diversity or Merit

Some of the IIMs have clearly stated that they are going to give a boost to girl candidates and non-engineer candidates. B-Schools have always rated diversity very high and informally nudged things around here and there in order to get balance. I am of the view that the diversity-drama is a bit of a sham, a bit overcooked and is very unfair to both the "boosted" and the "boosted at the cost of". This post is an attempt at busting some of the myths

Engineers all have uniform opinions, so you get no 'other' view on things
What humbug. This is one of the most convenient non-truths. Quality of the input/view is way more important than the mere diversity factor. If you are discussing astrophysics, would you have a sportsperson on the panel because he might have something different to offer. I have had some of the most wonderful discussions with fellow engineers. And been irritated by the fetish for difference from fellow B-School grads (these could be engineers also). If you are watching test cricket on TV, would you choose a panel that has Richie Benaud and Harsha Bhogle or one that has Mandira Bedi and Charu Sharma. High quality discussion brings to light diverse views. Not the other way around. Do you think intelligent engineers are blinkered? What gives one the right to assume this.

Are there not even 500 good girls who can get into the IIMs. How anti-women are you if you say that girls should not be given a boost
The most important and the least-debated aspect of this whole issue is how patronising the above conjecture is to the girls. The best ones who would have anyway gotten in will now be seen as being among the ones who got a boost thanks to the system. The ones arguing against this kind of "boost" are not the ones who are saying there are not enough good girl candidates around.

On the contrary, I firmly believe that there are plenty of good girls around. I also firmly believe that they can get in, compete and do well without anyone offering them any extra help. Some of the girls who were my classmates were very good. I would love it if the country stopped patronising them in the pretext of helping them.

Everyone stereotypes. Next time some girl gets into an IIM, I am sure everyone around will go - Yeah, so what your chromosomes probably played a bigger role than your grey cells in getting you there. Which is so sad.

BA English and B.Sc Maths grads can be very intelligent too
Of course. I am not denying that. Only to test this, you have designed the CAT exam. The CAT exam is not a maths test, as everyone is made to believe. Worldwide, math and verbal ability have been taken as proxies for gauging intelligence. India is no different. The maths level tested in CAT is at best of the standard X level. As a signal of smarts, the exam is a pretty good proxy. If the examiners so believe that it is not a good enough proxy for smarts, they should change the entrance exam. Design it in such a way that no group is at an unfair advantage. Randomly adding marks at the end of the whole process is just backdoor entry.

All arguments be damned, we are conducting a social experiment because we can:
This is what the IIMs are telling us, in essence. The merits of diversity have never been demonstrated. We are just adopting received wisdom from everyone because it is convenient. All of education (especially in India) is a signal. A degree conveys the ability of a student to grasp/perform rather than the knowledge he/she might have gleamed in college. Engineering colleges are tougher to get into (the good ones. the ones that actually try to teach engineering), tougher to survive in, and tougher to get out of. The IIMs are effectively telling the kids to not go through this rigour if they want a better chance at getting into the IIM.

The worst affected are going to be the guys in the IITs. Poor sods. They crack JEE and believe they are getting into an elite crowd. Little do they know that at every level, they are going to be discriminated against due to their presence in this elite crowd. Some joker at IIT with a 99.6th percentile will end up with no IIM calls because he would not be bringing in diversity into an IIM, whereas a non-IIT engineer with 99.4th percentile will still get a call. All because the non-IIT engineer will bring more diversity. Ha. The joys of rightful discrimination.

IIM Cal probably has the best policy. Power to them.

IIMs to give an extra bonus to non-engineers and girls

First, let us have the facts, which have as ever been embellished by TOI (Someone's idea of earning a salary is based on offending all groups of people. To begin with, the heading is 'graceless').

All the six new IIMs and the ones at Lucknow and Kozhikode feel it`s time to rebalance the gender scales in office spaces. So while IIM-Rohtak will give 20 marks to each girl and another 20 to a non-engineer, IIM-Raipur will add 30 marks to the overall scores of each girl-non-engineer. IIM-Lucknow has decided to grant five marks to each girl and two to non-engineers.

Across the board, almost all IIMs have decided to give a boost to girls and non-engineering candidates.

What does this imply?
Obviously, this makes things easier for girls and non-engineers. The bar for quant cut-off at least will now be much lower. I would argue that a 98th percentile overall will still leave you in with a shout if one is a girl, non-engineer.

The implication for engineers is more interesting. Not only will engineers have to focus more on verbal ability, they will have to stress on quant as well as the pool of seats available to engineers would have now shrunk again. So, the engineers will have to get more than 99.3 percentile in quant to have a shot at the IIMs.

What should one focus on?
Nothing much changes. Engineers, please do not assume that VA alone will matter. You will effectively be competing with the world on VA and with fellow engineers for Quants. Given that the engineering entry just got tougher, both need to be good. As we have mentioned in an earlier post, one should focus more on Critical Reasoning questions now.

What else has changed?
Almost all the IIMs are veering towards having a "writing" section in the second round. Again, perhaps part of the overall convergence that Naveenan had mentioned. So, keep this in mind for the post-CAT preparation phase.

Just another word of caution, do not get caught up in the inevitable diversity vs. merit debate that will spring up all around you. That is an important debate, no doubt. But, whether you are an engineer or not, scoring well on that debate gives you pish-tosh in CAT. Accepting some frameworks and chugging along is an absolute necessity to crack things in India/anywhere. So, have an academic interest in this debate, but do not get completely consumed by it, at least until CAT.

That said, those of us who have finished our MBA (including yours truly) can continue to pontificate and so, will be discussing this issue in future posts. ;-)

CAT 2011 - Verbal

This post focuses on how the verbal section of CAT might be structured. To get our thoughts on the quants section, and on caveats, check out this post .

We break-down the verbal section also into 3 segments

Reading Comprehension - 9-12 questions: This section's importance should go up slightly in the newer format. Usually, we see 9-10 questions, this could creep up to 12 questions in some papers.

Sentence Correction, Sentence Rearrangement, Sentence Completion: 9-10 questions: Traditional verbal sections. These can be done reasonably quickly, but error rate could be higher. Pick the best ones and have a go. The crucial take-away here is - Do NOT be in a mad rush to run through your RC passages. Take time over RC. This is not a speed-reading exam.

Newer type questions: They are saying Logical Reasoning, we think it is more likely to be what is termed as critical reasoning or analytical reasoning: First up, let us clarify the definitions.

An LR question will usually be of the type - 4 houses - blue, red, green, yellow with four residents - engineer, doctor, teacher, painter, with 4 cars - Santro, Innova, i10, BMW. The engineer does not drive a santro and does not stay next to the doctor etc

The critical reasoning question will be usually a mini-case study with an inference-type question at the end of it. Example
Sachin Tendulkar's test average in matches India loses is 15 runs lower than when India wins a match. This clearly demonstrates that Sachin's performance clearly drives India's performance. Which of the following, if true could undermine above argument

A. Average of most batsmen is lower in losing causes than winning causes
B. India has won most of its matches at home
C. India wins only high-scoring matches, etc

These used to be called Analytical Reasoning questions and were fairly common in the CAT exams of late 90's early 00's.

The big difference of the change in format could be the fact that these kind of questions make a comeback.

The final 9-10 questions could easily be 3-4 LR, 3-4 CR, 1-2 Fact, Inference, Judgement type questions.

So, while preparing for this section, focus on sentence construction and error-types, get some practice for analytical reasoning questions and remember to read slowly.

CAT 2011 - Preparation plan

With only around two months to go, it is a good time to think about the overall paper. We also need to keep in mind the changes in format. So, have given below our ideas of how the paper might be structured.

Caveat alert: This is our view of how they might structure CAT and might have absolutely no link with how CATIIM is thinking about it (Always good to get the disclaimers in early. This is the one thing they drill into investment bankers). With that out of the way, let us get to the sections.

This post focuses on quants. Will follow up with a verbal specific post

Quants
We would look at this as three segments, of about 10 questions each

Segment I: This is going to be the section that covers simple quant topics - Averages, Percentages, Profit & Loss, Pipes Cisterns, Simple Interest -Compound Interests, Shares, Progressions, Ratio-Proportion, Speed-Time, Races, Mixtures, etc. There should be around 10 questions in this segment. Almost all questions in this section will be do-able but time-consuming. Student should shoot to get 8-9 of these in about 30-33 minutes. Even if it takes more than 3 minutes per question, it could be worth it.

Take your time but get it correct

Segment 2: This is the set of concept-heavy questions - Number Theory, Geometry, Permutation-Combinations, Inequalities and perhaps a bit of Set Theory. These will be slightly non-formulaic questions. But these will help you save time in case you have the fundas right. Should shoot to attempt 6-7 of these in about 13-15 minutes.

Pick the correct questions and solve them really quickly

Segment 3: 3-4 questions of pure DI, 2-3 questions of DI presented in unconventional format, 3-4 of Data Sufficiency etc. Attempt 7-8 of these in about 22-25 minutes. In this segment DI will be time-consuming, DS will be hit or miss.

Overall, shoot to try 22-23 questions. This number should be good enough to hit 99th percentile +. There are two big mistakes that one should avoid.

1. Getting lots of practice for simpler topics, ignoring No.theory+Geometry: This is absurd. Get problems under the belt for the simpler topics, study from first principles for No. Theory and Geometry. One should know the basis for each formula, not just the formula. You should know how to solve problems like the ones seen here . And be clear on concepts in geometry

2. Skipping simple-topic questions because they take more than 3 minutes to solve: 3 minutes per question is good speed. If you understand a question based on Speed-Time and can definitely get it right in even 3.5 minutes, go for it. The concept-heavy topics are the ones where you should shoot to save time. Do not be in a mad rush for speed in the questions from the simpler topics. You HAVE TO get these correct. So, no point making some silly error here.

CAT Format changes - Some additional points

Just thought I would add 2-3 inputs from Naveenan and Vimal (my colleagues at 2iim who run the centers at Mumbai and Bangalore respectively).

Importance given to verbal ability has increased: Verbal accounts for 50% of the exam now, up from 33% previously. Being merely quant-strong will not be enough to crack this exam. Students need to look at Sentence Correction and critical reasoning more aggressively

Stamina will count for a lot now: In the past editions, students had the advantage of changing sections mid-way, front-loading reading components, shuffling within a paper, etc. Now, a student will spend 2 hours before starting the exam, then spend 70 minutes doing quant, and then start the first verbal question. By the time you near the end of the verbal section, you would have spent more than 220 minutes staring at a computer. If you are the kind that gets tired reading RC passages, then you will have to work a lot on improving stamina.

The other point that emerged from discussions is the fact globally exams are converging on one pattern. India is moving towards lowering primacy given to DI/LR exactly at the point of time GMAT/GRE are increasing importance to DI. So, perhaps we are reaching a middle-ground where patterns are beginning to converge.

CAT Format changes - What does this mean?

The format for CAT 2011 has changed. The key changes are as follows

1. Only two sections now, instead of 3. We will have one verbal and one quant section only, with 30 questions in each section. The DI-LR section has been split mid-way and been apportioned into quant and verbal. Quant will now contain - math + Data Interpretation while verbal section will include Logical Reasoning.

2. Timing raised to 140 minutes (from 135 minutes). The big change here is that now the time limit is two water-tight 70 minutes. A student can no longer apportion timing as he/she pleases. The exam will now comprise two sections of 70 minutes.

What are the key implications for students?

1. Only two section cut-offs to worry about: This simplifies life
2. Time management becomes much easier
3. Balance across sections will get rewarded: Earlier students weak in verbal could just spend five more minutes in the section and compensate for this. With water-tight sections, this kind of time-shifting is ruled out
4. Verbal assumes more importance now. The widespread perception is that CAT was still a "quant" exam. This change in format could lead to increased importance given to verbal.

What has been left unsaid?
This part is pure conjecture. These are the things I expect to see.
1. In the verbal section, the LR questions will be more like CR questions (Critical reasoning questions). We will see more questions that resemble mini-case studies and fewer questions that are puzzle-based. In my view, the verbal section will have 9-11 qns from RC, 3 each in sentence rearrangement, sentence correction and sentence completion, one puzzle that has 3-4 questions and 5-6 questions based on arguments, hypotheses etc.

2.The puzzle based questions will still feature in the quant section. The DI-LR section is effectively getting squeezed out a little in this format-change, in my view.

What trends will be seen?
1. More skewed percentiles: The guys who are really strong in quant/verbal are now going to ace this section without worrying about hoovering up time for the other section(s)
2. Candidates with balance will be at an advantage.

How should preparation style change?

Focus more on RC. Spend more time on critical reasoning and case-study type questions. CAT used to have these kind of questions about 10 years ago. They used to be called as Analytical reasoning. Dig up those archives and have a go.

If you are reasonably strong in the basics, forget about building speed doing random (baseless) speed-building exercises. Multiplication speed, reading speed are all going to matter less. The examiners are effectively saying - "I give you 2.5-3 minutes per question. If you can think clearly, you will never be hard-pressed for time"

Longer-term, where is this going?
The path has been laid out. They want to make this an exam that can be taken more than once a year. A more standardised test, a test more in line with global practices (GMAT, GRE), test that isolates quant and verbal, are all steps to ensure that they can make this a through-the-year exam either in 2012 or 2013.

CAT 2011 - Thoughts based on CAT 2010

CAT 2010 results were released a few days ago, and it is time to think about what we have learn from the results. I have categorized my thoughts into two categories.

Opinions that have been reinforced

1. CAT is not an impossibly tough exam. A number of diligent non-genius candidates have done really well. (All the evidence I am going to refer to is anecdotal and not based on any survey.). Thorough preparation, lots of practice and good planning should be enough to get candidates close enough. The final ingredient is perhaps a little bit of luck, but we cannot budget for that. The previous post on Self-belief holds good even now.

2. CAT rewards preparation from first principles: Quant, DI and verbal have all become more application-intensive and CAT 2010 has continued on with that trend. There is a higher bias towards non-formulaic questions. In maths and verbal, intuition and deeper-understanding is getting rewarded vis-a vis blind formulaic learning. As my boss never tires of saying - Intuition can be built with practice.

3. Balanced preparation is a must: With competition this high, one cannot afford to say my strength in quant should take me through. A few of our students learnt that lesson this time around

New pointers that CAT 2010 has shown us

1. Quant level across the country is pretty high: 15 years ago, \a student needed to just now a bunch of formulae, and need not have been conceptually sound. 6-8 years ago, when CAT made a shift towards more application-intensive questions, it was sufficient if one was conceptually sound. And you could get away without much practice. You always had time to derive 1-2 formulae, do trial-and-error and build hypotheses, verify with bunch of examples, etc. Now, the luxury to do all that is disappearing. A student almost needs to pick the right method to solve a question straightaway. No time for any trial-and-error business. One needs to have basics sound and practice gazillions of questions. The more different kind of problems you can lay your hands on the better.

2. To crack DI, one needs to be good at DI and LR: One out of two wont go. There are some tough DI passages and tough LR questions that you are better of leaving. The option of "I will kill DI and leave all LR questions" will not work

Those of you who are preparing for CAT 2011 and beyond, best wishes.

Belief in Self - That is ALL the difference

At the risk of imitating Mr. P. Chidambaram, I am going to seek the help of a tamil verse from the book Thirukkural, written by the poet Thiruvalluvar

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Vellathanaya Neermattam Maandhar tham
Ulla thana duyarvu

The meaning of this "kural" is - if you have seen a lotus, it will go up when the water rises in the tank and go down when the water level fell. Like that, the rise or fall of a human is based on his behavior and thoughts.

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Many an youngster is daunted by the fact that the CAT is written by 200,000+ students every year. Out of these, only 2,000 students make it to one IIM or the other. Only 15,000 students make it to a Tier - 1 b-school. The youngster conveniently concludes "I do not have a halo behind my head. I do not belong to those 2,000 students. Heck, I doubt if i even belong to those 15,000 students".

Think about it for a moment. Did those 17,000 (2,000 + 15,000) students make it to those b-schools because of a halo behind their heads? Were they differently built? Did they study in schools that the other 180,000 youngsters did not go to? Were the opportunities available to them as kids vastly different from the ones available to the other 180,000? Definitely not.

I think the ONLY difference was that the 17,000 students believed in themselves and believed in their ability to work hard while it was not the case with the other 180,000. Rather than write pages and pages of gyan, let us look at an real life example.

Year 2001: Our protagonist, X, is in his final year of college. As is the tradition amongst his batchmates, he also decides to write CAT. He does not prepare for it. Performs poorly. Arrives at the convenient conclusion that he is not 'CAT material' (whatever that means)

Year 2005: All along, X had not even given CAT a second thought - even though he always wanted to do an MBA. His colleague at the same office, Y, mentions that he had taken the cat in 2004 and is attending interviews at the IIMs for his admission.

That is when it dawns on X how naive he had been. He had let go 4 valuable years without even trying to figure out what it takes to crack the CAT. Y mentions that he had been preparing for a year for his CAT and it was not all THAT difficult. That is when it occurs to X that ALL it takes is preparation and a belief in self and anybody would be able to crack the CAT.

X starts preparing for the CAT exam in the same year. Keeps at it. Does not let go of his target. Cracks the CAT and goes on to study at an IIM in the city whose name starts with an A.

To this day, X is thankful to Y for having changed his mindset; for having opened his mind to the untapped opportunities; for helping him realize his dreams.

This is the real life story of one of our students. Last we heard about this guy, he helps CAT aspirants reach their goal.

There is an X in each of the 180,000 students who did not make it to a tier - 1 b-school of their choice. The X in this story was lucky to have bumped into Y. Are you one of those 180,000 X's? Do you still have to wait for the CAT to happen to your friend for you to start believing in yourself?

Our firm belief: It is not a matter of ability. It is a matter of self belief.

All the best ! God Speed !

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With CAT results just gone by, and many students mulling over CAT 2011, I think this is an excellent time to read an article like this.

The article is by none other than X, who currently runs 2iim Mumbai.

Admissions into IIMs - How important is work experience in getting an admit?

There are many versions of this key question. How do the IIMs rate work experience? How much does it count for? All other things being equal, will the IIMs always prefer experienced grads? How much more should fresh graduates score in order to stand a chance?

Like many of the research reports, let me start with a disclaimer. I do not claim to have any inside knowledge on how the IIMs process applicants, and most of what I have to say is based on anecdotal evidence.

There is no objective normalization process for accounting for experience

The IIMs most likely do not have a scoring system for awarding points for work experience. It is my belief that the selection committee goes in with an idea of how they want the batch to be structured and conducts interviews with this backdrop.

As in, IIM Bangalore might say tell the selection panel, we would like to have around 60-80 fresh grads, 60-80 grads with 1-2 years experience and around 50-60 grads with more experience than that. Based on this, we have called 300 freshers, 300 1-2 years' experienced grads and 200 very experienced candidates for the interview.

So, after this kind of plan is made, effectively, the groups are more or less competing within each other, and therefore there is no way someone can make a statement like "if you have 4 years experience, you can get in with a score that is 1 percentile point lower than someone with 0 years experience". It is quiet likely that the mean and median score of shortlisted fresh graduates is higher than that of heavily experienced candidates, and this is what we mean by saying that experience counts for something.

Does 1-2 years experience count for much?

Not really. The guys with less than 24 months of experience constitute a high proportion of any batch, and any experience less than 24 months rarely counts for much. These candidates are unlikely to have picked up any great understanding of either their industry or organizational dynamics to make a huge impact.

Does the type of experience count?

All B-schools price diversity (some more so than others), so a different profile always counts for something. A lawyer/ doctor always has an edge over a software professional in our country. There is little doubt about this.

Will the IIMs shift towards more experienced candidates

With a shift to round-the-year exam to be conducted by an external agency, the IIMs will inevitably begin to value profile and experience more. So, this trend is likely to happen

Will the IIMs shun fresh graduates?

Extremely unlikely. No matter which position an institute holds, it will be keen on attracting the best talent available. So, if one IIM shifts towards picking only experienced candidates, then it will effectively lose out on fresh talent. As a talent pool, the fresh graduates compete favourably against other groups. Among the top 10 of any graduating class, one would usually find more than 70% of candidates with 0-2 years experience, with perhaps up o 40% being fresh graduates. There is limited statistical evidence to suggest that fresh graduates do not get value from an MBA. A large number of companies prefer to recruit fresh grads for internships and prefer to select fresh grads for entry-level positions. So, any one IIM, if it chooses to change its profile will end up losing out on talent. So, unless there is a concerted effort from the top 20 B-schools in India, the dynamics cannot change overnight.

I think India will slowly shift towards taking in more experienced candidates into their B-Schools. But this shift will be slow and more or less synchronised across institutes.

Will personal interview and GD be more difficult for fresh graduates?

The short answer is Yes. Fresh graduates have less to talk about themselves, less personal experiences to count on and refer to, will likely have had few opportunities to make presentations to anyone and are generally a little raw. Experienced candidates are naturally better-equipped to handle one-on-one sessions and group discussions. This is why fresh graduates should spend more time preparing themselves for GD-PI and should focus on presenting their case well.

Bottom-line

If you are a fresh graduate, do not let this talk of experienced candidates standing a huge advantage get to you. You are effectively competing against fellow fresh grads for the seats and in any case, you have likely done better than an average experienced candidate in the CAT exam and that should count for something.

If you have 1-2 years of experience, this is not a game-changer, so make sure you have enough talking points about your job.

CAT can now be taken through the year - What does this mean?

Now, it is more or less official. The CAT exam is set to be conducted through the year. If not from 2011, this is set to happen from 2012 onwards. This is a significant shift from the CAT, and coming close on the heels of the shift to computer-based exam, this changes the CAT market substantially.

Why have the IIMs done it?

The IIMs have tried to make three transitions over the past 3-4 years - paper-based to computer-based, once a year to round the year and to try and create a separate entity to run the exam. All three suggest that the IIMs want to make this a broader standardized test, rather than being purely viewed as an entrance exam for the IIMs. Historically, more than 100 universities have used the CAT, but many among these have used multiple exams (CAT, GMAT, GRE, JMET, etc) for selecting students.

The IIMs are eying a larger share of this market and want to remove the timing constraint in taking the CAT exam. Last year, 2 lakhs students took the CAT. If it is made a round-the-year exam, that number could easily go up another 30-40%. Add to this the fact that there would be many students that would be attempting the CAT more than once a year, this is great news for CAT. A large number of professionals find it difficult to plan for the CAT. Now, with more freedom to choose the dates, a large number of these will start writing the exam.

How are things different for test-takers?

Freedom to select dates on which you can take is always a boon. One can account for everything from foreign assignments, exam schedules and superstitions when selecting the correct dates. But, in every competitive exam, any change is likely to be a zero sum game. This change, I believe will be a disadvantage to freshers and a boon to experienced candidates.

Experienced candidates are usually the ones that struggle to plan well in advance, struggle to set aside 10-11 months to prepare for the exam, and generally end up not putting in enough preparation for the CAT. Now, anyone shifting jobs will want to take a 6-week break, prepare for CAT and take it at the earliest (somewhat similar to the GMAT). More importantly, the CAT scores will get de-emphasized even more and profile, experience will matter more.

Scoring 99.94th percentile in a once-a-year CAT might more or less guarantee a seat in one of the top 10 univs, but scoring a corresponding score in a round-the-year CAT will be less of an achievement. This de facto implies that profile, experience, academic background, etc matter more. Indian schools might become similar to the global ones in that, they will start with a CAT cut-off and then shortlist based on profile, rather than shortlist based on CAT scores. This will be disadvantageous for fresh graduates. This will also be disadvantageous for candidates with a standard profile (such as an Engineer with 3 years of experience in Patni/Polaris).

More experienced grads will prepare for this, more of them will prepare better, and for many of them the experience will count for more. So, freshers might not be the happiest bunch due to this change. Having said that, India is probably the only country that allows so many freshers to do an MBA. Globally, students with zero experience doing an MBA is the exception rather than the norm. So, this shift towards selecting more experienced candidates was also always coming, I guess.

How does this change the preparation pattern?

The content does not change at all. One needs to prepare for the same quant, DI and verbal. But, a 12-week intense routine will probably be the preferred route, rather than a 15 month course of low intensity. Till 2000, students used to prepare for less than 4-5 months for the CAT. Only after these coaching institutes realized that getting college students early is very lucrative, did the cycle of preparation slowly expand to 15 months. This is probably an overkill. Students will start opting for the short burst rather than the low-intensity momentum-killing build up. More experienced candidates will want to prepare over a 12-week cycle, more diverse candidates will want to give it a crack. Fresh grads will probably still prefer the 12-month routine, mostly because this will ensure the ground work is done if ever they want to take the CAT 2-3 years down the line. Hopefully, some newer players will emerge in the test-preparation space :)

All in all, this is good news, one can plan for CAT better, the IIMs are set to make more money, and quality of paper should improve further. Who knows, the CAT might begin competing with the GMAT outside the Indian market as well. I am among few people who believe that the quality of the CAT exam is excellent (barring the few errors). If they manage to cut the error-rate, we could have an excellent test on our hands. Probably worth marketing it globally.

CAT - In defence of the CAT

As CAT 2010 draws to a close, we will soon be hearing a lot of feedback on the quality and consistency of the exam, the technology, organization, etc. It is about the same time that we will hear people saying that the CAT is a pointless exam, an exam that tests unnecessary skill sets, and an exam that is needlessly too difficult. People will tout examples of various calculation-intensive questions friends of friends of theirs saw in the paper and feel vindicated about their claim that the CAT is a very computation-heavy random exam designed to test unnecessary things. You will probably also hear the inevitable "Why is it necessary to do 24.5 * 35.4 in 10 seconds to be a good manager".

Most of the people who say this know little to nothing about the CAT, and at any rate have not spent enough time either thinking about the paper or evaluating it. They are happy to accept the established stereotype and help it along.

My colleagues and I have been taking the CAT almost every year and can state unequivocally that the quality of the paper has improved with time. There are 3 key myths that people have been spreading about the CAT

1. It is a calculation-intensive exam: On an average, about 5 out of 40 questions in Quant + DI are of this type, and one can skip this and still score 100th percentile in CAT. CAT was calculation-intensive in the late 90's, it has tested application heavily in the past 10 or so years.

2. CAT does not test relevant skills to be a manager - also stated as "Why should someone know Set theory to be a good manager?": At some level, CAT is an entrance exam designed to test basic intelligence. Any academic performance is a signal that the student can potentially do well. So, the CAT is looking for a signal of intelligence. Around two lakh students of diverse backgrounds take this exam every year. One needs to find something very basic to use it as a proxy for intelligence. Testing numerical ability, problem solving ability and comprehension ability are probably the best proxies available. What would you rather test - general knowledge, science, subject-knowledge? Anything else pales in comparison. Also, remember, CAT is not an entrance exam to be a manager. It is an entrance exam to get admission into a school that will train you to become a manager.

3. Some questions in CAT are too difficult: This is a problem that has come about because of a specific characteristic of India - one of large numbers. CAT needs to make a distinction between the average and the good. But if this were the only distinction that CAT needed to make, a consistent and simple paper would suffice. But the CAT also needs to make the distinction between good and really good and really good and exceptional. Remember, they need to devise a mechanism to distinguish the top 0.2 percent within the top 1 percent. This suggests the need for creating "men and boys" questions. Questions that demarcate the exceptional from the merely very good. Any paper where the really good students can attempt 55+ out of 60 students within 135 minutes clearly indicates that this is not too difficult. If the paper is peppered with simple questions, the exam just tests just speed, and not understanding. A slightly tougher paper that requires a high level of application is required for getting the top 0.2% from a sea of applicants.

Most people will agree that it does not require a genius to crack CAT. It just requires loads of application, good decision-making ability and adequate preparation. Sounds like a good test for finding managerial talent to me :)

Now, finally to the point that irks people the most, why should calculation-speed be a factor at all? When the whole globe does not really rate calculation-speed, why does India (CAT) cling to this notion? The answer again, is straightforward. India still believes it is a critical skill set. And the CAT is trying to find the best proxy to select smart Indian kids. Why should the CAT not test what India finds important. If anything, the CAT has been doing a lot to de-emphasise this feature. Over the past 10 years, the number of number-intensive questions have fallen sharply, and rightly so. India is moving on, and the CAT is setting the pace. CAT cannot move on all on its own, then they will end up getting all the wrong candidates.

So, there goes my defence of the CAT. I am sure the IIMs wont care much about giving their viewpoint. So, here is my version of how they might have done it.

Having said all this, some things irk me a lot. The complete lack of consistency in the paper is an issue that CAT needs to address. More importantly, the CAT needs to be error-free. Especially now that they have multiple sessions. The CAT was not error-free this year. Far from it. And god knows how they treat the wrong questions. I cannot think of a single fair way of treating error-filled papers. Hope they improve on this.