Net helps aspirants bell the CAT
CAT aspirant have discovered the advantages of using online help to prepare for one of the toughest B-School tests on the planet. Glory of gifting | Diwali gifts for business
By Jacob Cherian, TNN |
MUMBAI: Lucknow-resident Umesh Gandhi moved to Chennai early this year to work for TCS in the firm’s engineering consultancy division. The 25-year old, who lives with his friends, will in nine days take the Common Admission Test (CAT) for the second time. He has been preparing for the CAT at the nationwide tutorial class, Career Launcher. This happens on weekends. He, however, feels this is not enough. He doesn’t have the time to take off from work, hide away at home, and prepare for the test. He just has to click on one of the online sites that offer preparatory material, largely mock tests, for CAT.
Mr Gandhi is not the only CAT aspirant to have discovered the advantages of using online help to prepare for one of the toughest B-School tests on the planet. Only 0.6% of the 2,00,000 candidates actually make it to the IIMs — the country’s premier B-Schools. Unlike classroom or postal preparation, online tests can be taken anywhere, can change difficulty levels on the fly and can answer student queries around the clock.
No wonder then that Mr Gandhi, whenever he gets some amount of free time at work (ten minutes, to be precise), gets online and does a quick test at ten-a-day.com. The site has a tool that helps him identify where he is lacking. He explains: “This tool divides the difficult questions into perceived difficulty and actual difficulty.
The point of CAT is not only to answer accurately, but also to identify which questions are the easier ones and, therefore, attempt them first. If I were to answer fewer questions more accurately, I would score better. That has been the way the paper has been set over the past two exams.”
This particular tool, called the ‘CAT Probe’, tells test-takers how they are approaching the questions. After a aspirant takes the test, the analysis tells him how he could approach the questions better. This was not available with mock-tests in tutorials, which is limited to just percentile and score.
In another corner of the country, Tarun Gupta, from the Punjab Technical University in Ludhiana, is using another service on another site. He says, “After four or five mock tests at my tutorial, it began to get predictable. The faculty that sets these tests at all these institutes are basically the same.” So this 22-year old discovered online mock tests on solidgyan.com. Now he says, he sees a wider range of question types than he saw at the tutorial and feels more confident.
Gareema Rishi in Delhi, is another aspirant who has discovered yet another service which helps her prepare. She is a registered user of onaptitude.com. Her attraction to the site is a feature called “Ask Doubt”. This feature allows the user to clear doubts 24-hours a day. Ask a doubt and the site guarantees to clear it within two hours, even at 3 am.
Mr Gandhi is not the only CAT aspirant to have discovered the advantages of using online help to prepare for one of the toughest B-School tests on the planet. Only 0.6% of the 2,00,000 candidates actually make it to the IIMs — the country’s premier B-Schools. Unlike classroom or postal preparation, online tests can be taken anywhere, can change difficulty levels on the fly and can answer student queries around the clock.
No wonder then that Mr Gandhi, whenever he gets some amount of free time at work (ten minutes, to be precise), gets online and does a quick test at ten-a-day.com. The site has a tool that helps him identify where he is lacking. He explains: “This tool divides the difficult questions into perceived difficulty and actual difficulty.
The point of CAT is not only to answer accurately, but also to identify which questions are the easier ones and, therefore, attempt them first. If I were to answer fewer questions more accurately, I would score better. That has been the way the paper has been set over the past two exams.”
This particular tool, called the ‘CAT Probe’, tells test-takers how they are approaching the questions. After a aspirant takes the test, the analysis tells him how he could approach the questions better. This was not available with mock-tests in tutorials, which is limited to just percentile and score.
In another corner of the country, Tarun Gupta, from the Punjab Technical University in Ludhiana, is using another service on another site. He says, “After four or five mock tests at my tutorial, it began to get predictable. The faculty that sets these tests at all these institutes are basically the same.” So this 22-year old discovered online mock tests on solidgyan.com. Now he says, he sees a wider range of question types than he saw at the tutorial and feels more confident.
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Gareema Rishi in Delhi, is another aspirant who has discovered yet another service which helps her prepare. She is a registered user of onaptitude.com. Her attraction to the site is a feature called “Ask Doubt”. This feature allows the user to clear doubts 24-hours a day. Ask a doubt and the site guarantees to clear it within two hours, even at 3 am.
Though these facilities are available, the companies providing them face the challenges of a weak internet penetration. Take Harshal Chandak, for instance. He is a 23-year old living in Dombivili near Mumbai. For the past five months he used online tools to prepare. He stopped about a month ago after his net connection and then his computer crashed. He says it was so painful to get back online that he has gone back to the old-fashioned method of preparing.
However, site owners are excited about the prospects of CAT going completely online by next year. As it implies that all of the two lakh odd aspirants who appear for this test annually will have to get comfortable with the internet.
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