CAT 2004 sprung a surprise - how can CAT not have a surprise?
For the first time in the history of CAT, IIMs have assigned different weightages to different questions - in the quant section there were 20 one mark questions and 15 two marks questions - totalling up to 50 marks. In the DI section, there were 26 one mark question and 12 two marks questions adding up to 50 marks and in the verbal section you had more variety - half a mark questions (10 of them), one mark questions and two mark questions adding up to 50 marks.
Therefore, the age old advice that all questions are equal and carry the same mark will no longer apply. To that extent one can claim that there is a paradigm shift in the way one should go about strategizing for CAT.
However, the truth is that nothing has really changed as far as how a student should look at CAT - because in most cases the one mark questions in CAT were considerably easier than the two mark questions and the half a mark question in verbal were the fill in the blanks question and were the - "see and mark" types.