From as long as I can remember till at least CAT 2004, CAT was a test of nerves. It was considered to be a test that tests a person's aptitude, decision making and analytical skills. Almost every paper in the period I have mentioned had surprises both in the paper's format and its content. Even if the change only amounted to 15 to 20 percent of the paper, it was enough to unsettle even the most prepared student. In the last three years, I am not sure if CAT has in a real sense checked the aptitude of students writing the test. I sense the objective of the paper has changed to some extent.
In the last three years, the CAT has been very unlike what it was in previous years. Is it because of the way things are in financial markets? Is there a focus on selecting people who can easily fit into profiles such as investment banking? Your guess is as good as mine or for that matter, anybody else's. We have been witness to many changes that have taken place in the past three years. Glimpses of what was to follow were revealed in CAT 2004. The trend of fewer questions that stress on analysis (read: mathematical logic) and comparatively less choice in the Verbal section have been the hallmark of the CAT in the last three years. Speed and selection of questions were key elements of CAT in earlier years and a student need no longer be obsessed about these anymore. Is this there a clearcut focus behind this trend?
I believe the IIMs are looking for people that they feel would fare well in the corporate world. The criteria by which they select students are now very different from what they were ten years back. Earlier, a person who merely scraped through undergraduate studies could aspire to be a successful manager by getting admitted to the IIMs. This is simply not possible any more. There are eligibility criteria which need to be fulfilled in order to apply to the IIMs (an assumption being that if a person scores say 40 percent marks in his college studies then he cannot be a good manager!). Further, at the interview stage there are weights allotted for scores achieved in classes ten and twelve (IIM Bangalore revealed this fact in 2006). Does this mean that an academic bent of mind is critical for a person to deliver as a manager? I disagree with this line of thinking. It may be true in certain careers but an all-encompassing ban on poor performers in academics may hurt the 'creative' rebels in the system. Personally speaking, I have a fair number of friends who were not good in academics but went on to become phenomenal managers. For success in the corporate world, Emotional Quotient (EQ) is as important as Intelligence Quotient (IQ).
The shift of focus towards mathematical logic is obvious. In the last three years, questions related to Mathematical ability have comprised two-thirds of the CAT paper while earlier forty percent of the paper was devoted to testing verbal skills. Has this resulted in the IIMs losing out on people who are not skilled in Mathematics? Currently, students in IIMs with some sort of background in Mathematics make up an overwhelming percentage of the batch. All these seems to clearly indicate that the focus of the IIMs is to fill the pipeline with people having quantitative skills. For instance, for the admissions of the 2007–2009 academic session, a mere eight percent of the total students to get a call from IIM Bangalore were students who were not from a science background. Is an eye on the finance sector the reason behind these developments? Maybe.
In the process, I fear we may end up sending a lot of ‘similar thinking' professionals (all of them aspiring to get into Finance and Consulting roles) from the IIMs into the corporate world with. Everything else is subordinate to these careers. The story could change with the setback to the finance industry.
I have been associated with mentoring students for a long time now. In my personal experience I have discovered that students with backgrounds different from Mathematics are very different in their approach for a host of issues. They also seem to be have a wider and more varied set of skills as compared to engineers (I may be generalizing here). This search for students skilled in Mathematics makes us lose out on perspectives that are different. Of course, there are many institutions which still do not subscribe to supremacy in Math as being proof of a high IQ. Thanks to this line of thinking they have been able to build and maintain a good diversity of students. So, in this process of catering to the knowledge economy, the IIMs may be losing out on so many brilliant people who are not skilled in Mathematics but could have made the system so much more rich by their presence. It is a hard fact now that someone who is brilliant in English but poor in Mathematics cannot be confident of securing admission to an IIM. That was not the case ten years back. Students who are not comfortable with Mathematics need to devote more time to it while preparing for the test. They are required to approach CAT from the perspective of learning Mathematics and not with the goal of preparing for an aptitude test. This itself is a terrifying thought for a fair number of students. I sincerely hope the balancing act between focus on Mathematics and English in the CAT will happen soon and not later.
All this brings us to the crucial issue - Can CAT considered to be an aptitude test? I beg to differ on this count. In CAT, the focus on knowledge is significantly increasing. People can get 25 questions right in 150 minutes and secure a call from the IIMs. This strikes me to be a funny situation. Further, someone who gets eight questions right in English is considered to have done well. I think that these are definitely not the features of a well-designed aptitude test. These issues have plagued CAT in the recent past. Hopefully, CAT will change and revert to what it used to be in the past where it was an 'aptitude test' in a true sense. I would have vouched for the design of CAT in the past. Now, I can't.
R Shiva Kumar is Director - R&D and Academics, Career Launcher and an alumnus of IIM Calcutta and IIT Madras.