IIM CAT(Common Admission Test) is without doubt the most important Management Entrance Exam for all B-School aspirants. CAT is conducted by IIMs which are unargubly the most aspired Management Institutes in India. Other than IIMs, CAT scores are used for shortlisting  by many other Institutes which includes most of the leading B-Schools in India. Therefore for the candidates who aspire to become a part of a leading management institute in India CAT is definitely the exam for which they put their maximum efforts. Traditionally CAT has been a paper based test conducted on a single day around the country. However from this time CAT has been turned into a Computer Based Test which will be conducted over a period of 10 days with two sessions in a day. Therefore candidates had an option of choosing suitable date and time from among the 20 different sessions over a period of 10 days according to availability.

Since this is for the first time that CAT is being conducted as a Computer-Based Test it has created panic among aspirants who are not too comfortable with computers. However there is no need to worry as CAT fundamentally remains the same. The only major difference will be instead of reading questions from a paper and circling the option in the Paper candidates will read the questions on a screen and choose a suitable option by clicking on it. Infact the candidate will not have to worry about properly darkening the circle and erasing the circles for changing the answer. It will be a lot more easier to choose or change the answers. Candidates will see 1 question at a time. They can either choose to answer the question, ignore the question or mark the question for review later. Candidates can go back to unanswered questions or to the questions of which they want to change the answer. Candidates can anytime go to the review section where they can check all the answered questions, unanswered questions and questions marked for review. They can then choose to review all the questions/Incomplete questions/Questions marked for review. Hence it is lot ore easier for candidates to keep a track of all questions as compared to a Paper Based Test where candidates had to keep track of all questions manually. Candidates can also directly go to any question in the review section.

The duration of the exam will be 2 and a half hours which will include a 15 minute tutorial that will guide the candidates about how to take the test and the available facilities which have been already mentioned in the post. There will be 60 to 70 multiple choice questions to test candidate’s verbal, quantitative and logical & data interpretation skills. Candidates will have to do good in all the three sections as there are sectional cut-offs for all the three sections. There will be a negative marking also so the candidates should choose the option carefully to avoid negative marking. The nature and difficulty level of the questions will be same as that in past CAT papers. Since CAT will be conducted on different days and time-slots there will obviously be different question papers set for different candidates. However all the question-sets will be of same difficulty level. Candidates will also get a scratch paper for doing all the calculations etc.

There is a misconception that CAT will be an Adaptive Test like GMAT/GRE where the difficulty level of the latter questions will change depending on the answers given by the candidate to the previous questions. This is completely untrue. The questions will be fixed at the start of test and remain the same throughout the test irrespective of whether the candidate answers questions correctly or incorrectly. Therefore as previously mentioned the basic nature of CAT remains the same and candidates do not have to worry. Anyone who can open simple websites on internet or have used computer should not face any problems specially in an exam like CAT. The Official CAT website has provided the facility to take a Demo of Online CAT to check what they can expect in the actual test. The link for Online CAT Demo is: Online CAT Demo.