Management Aptitude
Test (MAT) is one of the most popular exams taken by the MBA aspirants of
India. The exam is conducted by All India Management Association (AIMA) four
times a year, in February, May, September and December. The exam takes place in
two formats, paper pencil based and computer based. The candidate can choose
any of the formats but can take the test only once.
The paper pencil
based test takes place before the computer based test. The computer based test
takes place in two slots of a day. The number of days in which the computer
based test takes place depends on the
The MAT May exam
will take place on Sunday, May 1, 2011 for the paper pencil based test and the
computer based test will take place from Saturday, May 7, 2011 onwards. The
computer based test is conducted over two to three days based on the number of
registrations for the particular format.
Test Pattern
MAT basically tests
areas like Quantitative Aptitude, Logical and Critical Reasoning, Verbal
Ability, Data Interpretation/ Data Sufficiency and General Awareness. There are
200 questions in total, 40 in each section. The questions contain multiple
choices from which the candidate has to choose the correct option. The
acceptance of the scores of the General Awareness section depends upon the MBA
institutes.
There is 1 mark for
each correct answer and 0.25 negative marking on wrong answers. Total time to
write the test is 150 minutes.
Test Centers
MAT May 2011 will be
held in 84 test centers in India and two international centers of Dubai and Singapore.
Preparing for MAT
The difficulty level
of the paper is generally moderate. There are certain areas from which you can
expect questions.
Quantitative Ability
The topics on which
you can expect the questions to appear are: Time-Speed-Distance, Work and Time,
Pipes and cisterns, percentages, Partnerships, Averages, and Mixtures and
Alligations, Trigonometry, Geometry, Mensuration, Probability and Permutation &Combination.
Data Analysis & Data Sufficiency
This section has
questions on Data Interpretation, Data Sufficiency and Data Comparison.
Questions can be expected on: caselets, bar graphs and line graphs. The
difficulty level of this section can be rated as easy to moderate.
Reading Comprehension and English Usage
There are five
Reading Comprehension passages in the MAT paper. The questions are mostly
direct while some were inference based. There are total 20 questions.
In the English Usage
area, the topics on which you can expect questions are: Fill in the Blanks,
Para Jumble, Sentence Correction and Gist of the Paragraph. The questions are
on Easy to Moderate Difficulty levels.
Logical and Critical Reasoning
The questions of
this section test the logical and analytical abilities of the test taker. The
common topics on which the questions appear are: Data arrangement, Relations,
Linear arrangements, Coding/Decoding, Number and Alphabet Series, Venn Diagram,
Assumptions-Statements, Assertion-Reason. The questions on this section are on
the easy to moderate difficulty level.
General Knowledge
The General
Knowledge questions are mostly on current affairs and some questions are on
static GK. The topics of the questions are Economics, Current Affairs, Awards
and Prizes, Indian constitution, Business and Sports. The difficulty level of
this section can be rated as moderate to tough.
In this section, you
should just obtain the pass marks as the marks for this section wouldn’t be
included in the merit.
