Most of you would wonder whether there’s anything really worth writing about in the content of the CAT: after all, it’s an aptitude test, isn’t it? Big deal.
You’re right; it should have been that way. An aptitude test cannot and should be very open about its content. Moot point. And here comes the catch. Ideally, as you would agree, the content of an exam so famous and so old should keep springing one surprise after the other, remain completely accurate, should not repeat questions over years and, most importantly, actually check what it sought to check in the first place. Sadly, none of this matches up well with the CAT.
The CAT has done well on the count of surprise, but not too well. If you remove CAT 08, the previous papers from at least 1998 were predictable enough on at least one count: the weightage of the three sections was always the same. That means that the importance of language, number-crunching and logic was the equal for the testing body. That also means that while the dot-come world swooshed past, skill-requirements changed drastically, the old world order all but collapsed, communism died away (well, almost), MNCs and a borderless became a reality, nothing changed at the CAT. In the rapidly changing world they thought the basic skills required for a great manager remained constant and stagnant. And suddenly from 2007 to 2008 the world changed (at least for the CAT), because they suddenly woke up and decided in mid-life-stupor that language was 60% more important to management skills (CAT 08, you will remember, allocated 160 marks to language section vis-à-vis the 100 marks each for quants and DI/LR/AR). What prompted them to raise the bar in the verbal section would remain a mystery – the CAT Sphinx doesn’t bother to elaborate. If all the CAT committee wanted was to spring a surprise, they might has well have inserted some weightage for heart-bits and / or fitness: after all, Anil Ambani is the new poster-boy of the Indian corporate world and he is very fit, hence it follows all managers should pass a certain fitness test.
Next: accuracy; much has been written about it. In that matter, the CAT remains a true-blue PSU: sell an important commodity in a semi-monopolistic market, at a high-price, and never apologize – not even acknowledge – for the shoddy quality. I cannot think of a single year (i.e. a single CAT) having passed by without the CAT carrying one mistake or the other. Charming. If I pay Rs.1000 for a two-hour test, I have damned right to expect accuracy. No sir, the CAT doesn’t agree. Perhaps the CAT wants to wake us to the real-world reality: nothing’s perfect.
Next: repeats. Hold your breath. A shocking incident is about to unfold. The cancelled CAT (2003) was unique in many ways (apart from being a leaked paper of course). Its RC contained poems. No hassles. But did you know 3 questions of LR/AR were straight out of the CAT 98 (or 99). I still remember them: they were sitting arrangement questions. But hey wait: these were, in turn, lifted from the Barron’s GRE Analytical Reasoning 1998 edition. Not done. Not fair.
Finally, it’s not state secret that the CAT follows the GRE/GMAT model of testing. But that raises two important questions. One: assuming that GRE/GMAT questions were modeled after some careful research as to the skills required in the developed world context, is it ok for the CAT to assume that the same research fits perfectly to the developing country that India is? Have the CAT committee and the IIMs conducted any real-life research to identify what are the skills required to be tested? If yes, when, how often? Why not publish a white-paper on so vital a subject? Two: How do they justify the weightage accorded to the written test, GD, PI, work ex, acads, (80% in Chandu-Mandu college is not the same as 80% from NITs or the IITs, but that’s another story)? Is the weightage decided after some study, or is it done by the whim of some higher-ups?
Signing off with this thought for you to munch over: Do the IIMs practice what they preach? The very IIMs that preach glasnost, welcome the MNCs with open arms (good placement for students and good consultancy work for the professors) but shun competition from foreign university. Double standards. Ha ha ha.
* * *
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
CAT 2009: What lies beneath...
Well, well, well. That the CAT (the Common Admission Test, the entrance test to the Indian Institutes of Management) is a tough exam is hardly a state-secret. What is perhaps not so openly debated is its fairness in conduct, content, reporting style and responsibility towards the student community.
The idea of this blog is to share whatever little yours truly knows about cracking the CAT (as you will soon see, the little is pretty little), but that can wait for a while. The blog will, for now, attempt to examine the underbelly (pun unintended) of the CAT to find how just has it been over the years. The blog will also seek to understand whether, as a student, you have been getting worth out of the not-so-small amount you pay (Rs.1400 for 2009) towards the test. (The amount Rs.1400 for two-and-half-hours translates to Rs.560 per hour, near about what a good physician would charge for a consultation, but that’s quite another story.)
The blog will break down the argument in four parts: Conduct, Content, Reporting Style and Responsibility towards the student community. I shall start with discussing the first only.
Conduct: The CAT is going “on-line” (Computer-based). Big deal. What could have been the reason for doing so? Recessed amidst the frenzied furor of the news-media that the mighty CAT is going hi-tech – basically Indian exams coming of age – lies a question. Why? Since we have no way of knowing the exact compelling and convincing reasons, let us speculate.
Perhaps the candidate size was growing too large for the CAT committee to handle (reportedly around three hundred thousand)? Tch, tch, tch. If you teach management and you can’t manage numbers, aren’t you accepting the adage that consultants are those impotents who can preach but not practice? The recruitment exams of the SBI and the passports-to-babudom CSE (Civil Services Examinations) apparently manage larger numbers, with almost no complaints from either side.
There is a perfectly plausible reason no one dare admit: face-saving. How? Here it is.
Perhaps I may be wrong, but not too much. Of the last six CATs that come to my mind, perhaps no more than one was error-free. Yes, at least five of the previous six CATs had some error or the other. Not something to write home about if you claim to be (not without reason) the best management institutes of the country. Not fair if you can’t set 75 to 150 correct questions, especially when you are judging a student size that runs in hundred-thousands. Much less fair if you charge in four digits for a twenty-page booklet. The student community had, rightfully, in 2005 or 2006, approached the Supreme court questioning the validity of the error-prone CAT. (A recent bump like that was noticed in the GCET 2009, Gujarat State’s entrance test, but the results of both the court proceedings went in favor of the testing bodies.)
A Computer-Based Test (CBT) can sweep all this under the carpet. When the students have hard copy, a physical paper, they also leave the examination hall with the evidence of errors. But when the exam is a CBT, the student leaves with no evidence. File closed, reputation intact, and one is any wiser.
The second issue regarding the conduct is the fact that a CBT, purely out of the scarcity of sufficient number of computers, would be spread over a ‘window’. In other words the CAT is not a one-day affair as was till 2008, but will be spread over about a period of ten days. Candidates write their exams on different days, and hence they write different paper. How the CAT will decide that the three hundred thousand students were given different questions with a comparable level of difficulty beats me. If there is a software or an individual out there that/who can exactly judge the level of difficulty of each question, I have perhaps not heard of it/him/her. It is a personal belief of mine that the larger you are, the more answerable you are. The CAT must not only ensure the level of difficulty remains the same, but must also inform and satisfy the students that there was a level playing field.
An issue interlinked with this would be pertinent to raise: if the CAT has been unable to set a one single paper without errors in the near past, how and why does it want us to believe that all the multiple papers it will set will be error-free? If Yuvi has not performed in the last six matches, is it not a tad optimistic to believe that he will play consistently well in the whole of the world-cup matches and make no mistakes?
The final question that remains here is: will luck play a role here? I strongly think so. What has the CAT been doing with questions that were later found to be incorrect? It used to remove the question from the scoring. Since all the three hundred thousand students wrote the same paper, the effect of removing one question on all the three hundred thousand was uniform and hence the element of luck was reduced to near-zero. (Why near-zero? Well, the CAT used to give the same paper but with the questions in different order. That meant a safe-guard against copying. But the CAT has also had the dubious distinction of having made a different number of errors in different sets of papers. That meant that one candidate had an error-free paper while the other had two errors in his paper.) Doesn’t canceling the question really correct the mistake? Not necessarily so. If you were a student struggling for every single question, every single minute and every single mark, you wouldn’t be particularly pleased when, after struggling for five minutes and leaving the question you later were told the question was incorrect anyway.
Now that people will write different papers altogether, the probability that they will receive papers with different number of mistakes will also increase. That sounds a lot like 100m-sprinters running on tracks with different base and different lengths. Bolt, where are you?
The idea of this blog is to share whatever little yours truly knows about cracking the CAT (as you will soon see, the little is pretty little), but that can wait for a while. The blog will, for now, attempt to examine the underbelly (pun unintended) of the CAT to find how just has it been over the years. The blog will also seek to understand whether, as a student, you have been getting worth out of the not-so-small amount you pay (Rs.1400 for 2009) towards the test. (The amount Rs.1400 for two-and-half-hours translates to Rs.560 per hour, near about what a good physician would charge for a consultation, but that’s quite another story.)
The blog will break down the argument in four parts: Conduct, Content, Reporting Style and Responsibility towards the student community. I shall start with discussing the first only.
Conduct: The CAT is going “on-line” (Computer-based). Big deal. What could have been the reason for doing so? Recessed amidst the frenzied furor of the news-media that the mighty CAT is going hi-tech – basically Indian exams coming of age – lies a question. Why? Since we have no way of knowing the exact compelling and convincing reasons, let us speculate.
Perhaps the candidate size was growing too large for the CAT committee to handle (reportedly around three hundred thousand)? Tch, tch, tch. If you teach management and you can’t manage numbers, aren’t you accepting the adage that consultants are those impotents who can preach but not practice? The recruitment exams of the SBI and the passports-to-babudom CSE (Civil Services Examinations) apparently manage larger numbers, with almost no complaints from either side.
There is a perfectly plausible reason no one dare admit: face-saving. How? Here it is.
Perhaps I may be wrong, but not too much. Of the last six CATs that come to my mind, perhaps no more than one was error-free. Yes, at least five of the previous six CATs had some error or the other. Not something to write home about if you claim to be (not without reason) the best management institutes of the country. Not fair if you can’t set 75 to 150 correct questions, especially when you are judging a student size that runs in hundred-thousands. Much less fair if you charge in four digits for a twenty-page booklet. The student community had, rightfully, in 2005 or 2006, approached the Supreme court questioning the validity of the error-prone CAT. (A recent bump like that was noticed in the GCET 2009, Gujarat State’s entrance test, but the results of both the court proceedings went in favor of the testing bodies.)
A Computer-Based Test (CBT) can sweep all this under the carpet. When the students have hard copy, a physical paper, they also leave the examination hall with the evidence of errors. But when the exam is a CBT, the student leaves with no evidence. File closed, reputation intact, and one is any wiser.
The second issue regarding the conduct is the fact that a CBT, purely out of the scarcity of sufficient number of computers, would be spread over a ‘window’. In other words the CAT is not a one-day affair as was till 2008, but will be spread over about a period of ten days. Candidates write their exams on different days, and hence they write different paper. How the CAT will decide that the three hundred thousand students were given different questions with a comparable level of difficulty beats me. If there is a software or an individual out there that/who can exactly judge the level of difficulty of each question, I have perhaps not heard of it/him/her. It is a personal belief of mine that the larger you are, the more answerable you are. The CAT must not only ensure the level of difficulty remains the same, but must also inform and satisfy the students that there was a level playing field.
An issue interlinked with this would be pertinent to raise: if the CAT has been unable to set a one single paper without errors in the near past, how and why does it want us to believe that all the multiple papers it will set will be error-free? If Yuvi has not performed in the last six matches, is it not a tad optimistic to believe that he will play consistently well in the whole of the world-cup matches and make no mistakes?
The final question that remains here is: will luck play a role here? I strongly think so. What has the CAT been doing with questions that were later found to be incorrect? It used to remove the question from the scoring. Since all the three hundred thousand students wrote the same paper, the effect of removing one question on all the three hundred thousand was uniform and hence the element of luck was reduced to near-zero. (Why near-zero? Well, the CAT used to give the same paper but with the questions in different order. That meant a safe-guard against copying. But the CAT has also had the dubious distinction of having made a different number of errors in different sets of papers. That meant that one candidate had an error-free paper while the other had two errors in his paper.) Doesn’t canceling the question really correct the mistake? Not necessarily so. If you were a student struggling for every single question, every single minute and every single mark, you wouldn’t be particularly pleased when, after struggling for five minutes and leaving the question you later were told the question was incorrect anyway.
Now that people will write different papers altogether, the probability that they will receive papers with different number of mistakes will also increase. That sounds a lot like 100m-sprinters running on tracks with different base and different lengths. Bolt, where are you?
CAT - the old story of 2006
Whither management?
Every year thousands of MBA aspirants pour their hearts out (and their parents’ money too, in coaching classes) to get into the few coveted Indian B-schools. Every year, many B-schools – and that includes the most respected ones – play a trick or too and keep the aspirants guessing as regards the selection criteria.
Take the case of – who else – the IIMs. CAT (Common Admission Test) is the first hurdle that over 150,000 students this year have to clear before getting into the IIMs. The IIMs shortlist aspirants on the basis of their CAT scores, which they were expected to post on their respective websites on 1st Jan 2006. For the CAT conducted on November 20, 2005, at least one IIM was showing the status of the old CAT notification on its website! Nice try, but that’s hardly management.
It is as disheartening as disturbing to see that almost all coaching institutes – the ones that prepare you for CAT – offer more information on IIMs than the IIMs themselves. If you browse through the IIM websites, it might not always be easy to find a link to the results, but if you visit a websites of some coaching institute the link’s right there staring in your face. For an event like CAT result that over 1.5lac students wait with bated breath, why can’t the IIMs themselves make it easier? Highbrows or ivory towers? Not management, surely.
Even some of the most elementary information is something you can’t get out of either IIM websites or their brochures: data of fees, number of seats etc. are conspicuously absent in both sources. Solution: approach a coaching institute. Have the IIMs started outsourcing that too?
Over the past years, there have been coaching institutes that claim – and apparently they are correct too – that a couple of questions in the CAT are inconsistent or are incorrect. Are the IIMs listening? Doesn’t a test written by over 1.5lac deserve good proof readers?
Even if you write the CAT, you’ll never know your actual marks. What you get – and that too started as late as 2002 – is a scorecard that is enigmatically simple and complex at the same time. It tells you your ‘percentile’ – how you have done vis-à-vis others – and a score called ‘percentage’ which is actually your score compared to the toppers’. After going through this maze, you are still wondering what your actual scores are.
The worst part – or the best, depending on which side of the IIMs you are – is the IIMS will never let you have any statistics as regards the scores of those who those ‘gifted’ ones, the ones finally selected. What the IIMs will probably choose to call their prerogative of confidentiality translates to downright neglect of the basic right of applicants in a democratic country: a student has a right to know by how much he missed the target. It’s much like – well, forget it.
But the IIMs will continue basking in their glory of management – much of which is created by their tendency to guard all the CAT scores and selection criteria like they are guarding the heavy water plant. Good job IIMs, but you are in the wrong profession – with a fiercely secretive spirit like this, you deserve to be the information ministry of a communist country. By the way, did somebody say the IIMs teach subjects that cover corporate governance, business ethics, transparency, right to information, glasnost, and the like? I wonder what that means.
Every year thousands of MBA aspirants pour their hearts out (and their parents’ money too, in coaching classes) to get into the few coveted Indian B-schools. Every year, many B-schools – and that includes the most respected ones – play a trick or too and keep the aspirants guessing as regards the selection criteria.
Take the case of – who else – the IIMs. CAT (Common Admission Test) is the first hurdle that over 150,000 students this year have to clear before getting into the IIMs. The IIMs shortlist aspirants on the basis of their CAT scores, which they were expected to post on their respective websites on 1st Jan 2006. For the CAT conducted on November 20, 2005, at least one IIM was showing the status of the old CAT notification on its website! Nice try, but that’s hardly management.
It is as disheartening as disturbing to see that almost all coaching institutes – the ones that prepare you for CAT – offer more information on IIMs than the IIMs themselves. If you browse through the IIM websites, it might not always be easy to find a link to the results, but if you visit a websites of some coaching institute the link’s right there staring in your face. For an event like CAT result that over 1.5lac students wait with bated breath, why can’t the IIMs themselves make it easier? Highbrows or ivory towers? Not management, surely.
Even some of the most elementary information is something you can’t get out of either IIM websites or their brochures: data of fees, number of seats etc. are conspicuously absent in both sources. Solution: approach a coaching institute. Have the IIMs started outsourcing that too?
Over the past years, there have been coaching institutes that claim – and apparently they are correct too – that a couple of questions in the CAT are inconsistent or are incorrect. Are the IIMs listening? Doesn’t a test written by over 1.5lac deserve good proof readers?
Even if you write the CAT, you’ll never know your actual marks. What you get – and that too started as late as 2002 – is a scorecard that is enigmatically simple and complex at the same time. It tells you your ‘percentile’ – how you have done vis-à-vis others – and a score called ‘percentage’ which is actually your score compared to the toppers’. After going through this maze, you are still wondering what your actual scores are.
The worst part – or the best, depending on which side of the IIMs you are – is the IIMS will never let you have any statistics as regards the scores of those who those ‘gifted’ ones, the ones finally selected. What the IIMs will probably choose to call their prerogative of confidentiality translates to downright neglect of the basic right of applicants in a democratic country: a student has a right to know by how much he missed the target. It’s much like – well, forget it.
But the IIMs will continue basking in their glory of management – much of which is created by their tendency to guard all the CAT scores and selection criteria like they are guarding the heavy water plant. Good job IIMs, but you are in the wrong profession – with a fiercely secretive spirit like this, you deserve to be the information ministry of a communist country. By the way, did somebody say the IIMs teach subjects that cover corporate governance, business ethics, transparency, right to information, glasnost, and the like? I wonder what that means.
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