Undoubtedly the most coveted MBA entrance exam, Common Admission Test (CAT), was conducted this Sunday, 4th December ’16, in two slots. The exam was conducted smoothly across all the centers and there were no reports of any technical snag causing issues in the paper. However, many students came across really peculiar ‘glitches’ in the exam with respect to the content.

  1. Marking Scheme issue in CAT 2016

A strange thing seen in the paper was that on many of the questions, at the top, the marking scheme was given as (+1, -0.33) instead of the usual (+3,-1). This is definitely another careless error on the part of the CAT conducting body as the initial instructions of the paper clearly stated that the paper is of 300 marks, which definitely means that the marking scheme should be (+3, -1)

  1. Incorrect Symbols as an issue in CAT 2016

Many students across the country reported that in a few questions there was a pie symbol (π) at places where there should’ve actually been a square-root (√). This most definitely caused a lot of trouble for students who were pursuing these questions relentlessly during the paper.

  1. Incorrect questions in DILR and QA as an issue in CAT 2016

A few questions in DILR and QA sections turned out to be incorrect. In a certain question in DILR, there was more than one option that were correct whereas in the incorrect QA question, the correct answer was not there in the options.

In the QA section, there was no answer option for the following question:  an is the nth term of a GP and sn denote the sum of first n terms. a4 = 3s3 + 2 and 3s3 + 2 = a3. Find the common ratio
The correct answer to the above question is 1 which was not amongst the answer options

In the LRDI section, the following question had two correct options. The question was on the following lines:  Q. Two friends got their shirts interchanged. Now one has T-Shirt with color the starts with first letter of their first name. Conditions B and D are not violated. Which of the following is necessarily true.

These glaring mistakes in the content of the paper made most of the candidates waste a lot of their precious time on them and proved to be extremely frustrating for them when they later realized that these were actually incorrect questions.

CAT convener’s reaction these glitches, and more specifically on these incorrect questions, is still awaited. Students are in the hope that the CAT authority comes out with a statement regarding these. However, this experience of encountering incorrect questions reiterates the fact that one must not get involved in a question for too long. A student must trust himself and must leave a question if he/she is not able to solve it early enough.