CAT did justice in the form of the afternoon session being much like the forenoon session. One may say that VA & LR/DI was a touch difficult but QA was mostly of the same difficulty level as the Forenoon session.
As expected even the afternoon session had 3 sections comprising of 100 Questions. The First section comprised of Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension and had 34 Questions. The Second section comprised of Data
Interpretation & Logical Reasoning and had 32 Questions. The Third section comprised of Quantitative Ability and had 34 Questions.
Now, we go in for an in-depth analysis of CAT 2018 (Afternoon Session)
Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension
This section contained 24 RC questions and 10 other questions. There were 5 reading comprehension passages containing 24 questions split in 4 RCs containing 5 questions each and 1 RC containing 4 Questions. The RCs were lengthier than before but the topics were simple and the option choices were not that close. The RCs were mainly from Use of technology in education, Evolution of snails, Limitations of Performance Matrix, Science and Psychology based. The questions were of Main Idea, Inference based, Contextual based, Except and Students of Cf Patna would have had no difficulty working on them as they have practiced all that in class.
The Non-RC section was on the simpler side and had 10 questions comprising of Para Jumbles, Summary & out of the context questions. Para Jumbles were a touch easier as they had only 4 sentences unlike CAT 2017 which had 5 sentences and were non MCQ i.e. Key in questions as were the out of context questions. 2 of the Para jumbles were really easy. The 3 summary questions were difficult as the options were quite tricky.
Overall, the level of difficulty was moderate and an attempt of around 25-28 with 85% accuracy would classify as a good score in this section.
Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning
With the level of difficulty of this section increasing every year, the test takers were aware of the challenges of this section. Interestingly, the section was a little easier than the previous years but a little difficult than the forenoon session.
There were 8 sets with 4 questions each. Sets on Coding-Decoding, Revenue-Market share Profitability, Maxima –Minima based were moderate while sets on College Ranking and Linear Arrangement were easy. Caselet on Currency exchange and products of two companies on graph were difficult.
A well-prepared student should ideally attempt 4 to 5 sets. Overall, an attempt of 18+ with 80% accuracy can be termed a good job
Quantitative Ability
This section was the major surprise factor this year. As against the previous years this was relatively difficult or we may term confusing. Afternoon session had a lot of questions from Geometry, Alligation-Mixtures, Time and Work, Time, Speed and Distance. The questions needed to be read and understood before attempting and that resulted in many test takers skipping some ‘Doable” questions. There were 12 Key-in questions which were time consuming and required aspirants to be clear in their concepts.
Overall, 23 attempts with 85% accuracy would be classified as a good job.
Below is the expected break of sectional scores with respective percentiles
Overall, we can say that the paper was balanced and the CAT authorities need to be appreciated for the commendable effort.
Wishing all best to the CAT 2018 aspirants as they wait for their results and Good Luck for the other exams.