Some Facts About Cat 2010 And Its Cut Offs

CAT2010, Some Facts

The second edition of Common Admission Test 2010 began on Wednesday, October 27th 2010. CAT - a gateway to prestigious IIMs and other top B-Schools of India. Though last year the test was considered as a flop show  due to technical glitches, this year measures have been adopted to make CAT2010 glitch free.

In order to spread awareness about CAT 2010, IIMs and Prometric have released the CAT 2010 data.

Number of registrations: 2.42 lakh students had registered for the test in 2009 but in CAT2010 the number of registrations stands at 2.04 lakh. The total voucher sale was 2.06 lakhs.

Educational/Professional background of test takers: Engineers form the largest pool of CAT 2010 registrants (1.22 lakh). Then comes commerce students (30,248). Third position goes to BBA graduates with 21,809 aspirants. About 2421 applicants (2%) are from the biology stream.

Sex ratio: 74 per cent are males; 26 per cent are females.

Work experience of registered candidates: About 78 per cent of the people who have applied have less than one year work experience and a majority of them are fresh graduates.

Category of students:81% candidates are of General category. The OBC category candidates are 11%, SC category account for 6 percent and ST category 2 percent.

Test infrastructure: Over 9000 computers have been used to conduct CAT 2010. There are 240 labs in 78 test centers in 33 cities across the country.

Cutoffs for CAT 2010 to increase?

Data says that there were fewer test takers for CAT2010 this year and questions were also easy. But if you are with an opinion that fewer applicants for CAT 2010 means it is easier to get admission to IIMs, we will say, "please think again."

 The test will get tougher for those aspiring to get a seat at IIM-Bangalore. Ahead of the second edition of the online CAT starting from Oct 27, the Indian Institute of Management- Bangalore (IIM-B) has released the admission policy for the class of 2011-13.

Another thing to worry is that every year the cut-offs are increasing. The minimum cut-offs for this batch will be based on the CAT 2010 scores and the first shortlist will be drawn up based on the performance of candidates in CAT.

As per reports, the cut-offs for different sections have increased for the current batch. While minimum percentile requirement in quantitative section was 70% for the general category for the 2009 batch, it went up to 80% for 2010-12 batch. Sectional cut-offs for candidates under Other Backward Classes (OBC) also increased from 60% to 70% in quantitative section and 75% to 80% for verbal section. There was, however, no change in the aggregate cut-offs. The aggregate cut-off was 60% for differently-abled candidates while it was 90% under general category.

Overall, scores of CAT will only have a weightage of 20%. 15 per cent of weightage would be given to class Xth results and 10% for class XII. Candidates’ performance in the bachelors programme will carry weightage of 15% and personal interview (PI) will carry 20 points.

During the personal interview, a candidate would be given a time of 30 minutes to write on a topic given at the spur-of-the-moment by the B-school. Hence, a panel will judge a candidate’s performance on the basis of note and his interview.