There were no major surprises in the Afternoon session of CAT 2019 as it was in lines with the Forenoon session. The dynamic nature of CAT was again justified this year with VA being the toughest section in both the slots as against LR& DI and QA being in the earlier years.
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 2019 (Afternoon Session)
Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension
This section contained 24 RC questions and 10 other questions and was on the tougher side. 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, the topics were complicated and the option choices were not that close. The RCs were mainly from Green City, British Colonialism, Language & Identity etc. 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 like CAT 2018 and were non-MCQ i.e. TITA as were the out of context questions. The 3 summary questions were difficult as the options were quite tricky.
Overall, the level of difficulty was moderate to difficult and an attempt of around 22-24 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.
There were 8 sets with 4 questions each. The break up was 4 sets of LR, 2 sets of DI, 1 set game-based and 1 set based on Set Theory. 4 sets were doable and a smart test taker could go-ahead to work on 5 sets.
The section was moderate in nature. Overall, an attempt of 18-21 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 easier. The big surprise was missing of question based on Permutation Combination and Probability. As in the forenoon session, the Afternoon session also had a lot of questions from Arithmetic (Around 12) viz. Alligation-Mixtures, Time and Work, Time, Speed and Distance. Around 6 questions from Geometry and Mensuration. Interestingly, there were no questions from Coordinate Geometry. There were 10 Key-in questions with no negative marking.
Overall, 21-23 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 2019 aspirants as they wait for their results and Good Luck for the other exams.