The CAT demo at the IIM Banglore website and the CAT video on YouTube have answered a lot of questions and in the meanwhile created a lot of confusions too. The earlier post on the demo at PG had 43 comments riddled with queries. We talked to Ramesh Nava, Prometric Vice President & General Manager, Asia Pacific, Japan and Africa and tried to understand the finer aspects of the demo for ourselves.
To end all confusions, yes the CAT online exam will be divided into three sections, thus calculating one’s sectional scores will not be a problem.
Absence of the undo button raised a point of concern for all who took the CAT demo exam. Nava assures candidates that such will not be the case. He says, “While the CAT Demo familiarizes candidates with the ‘look and feel’ of the CAT, it does not demonstrate all of the robust functionality that will be available during the exam itself”. Hence, while a button called ‘undo’ may be absent from the exam, the candidate may change his/her answer by either selecting another choice or by de-selecting their original choice (by clicking on the answer a second time). Also, clicking on the ‘Mark’ button will mark an item for later review and clicking on it a second time will turn the ‘mark’ feature off.
In the demo CAT online test, once the candidate clicks on ‘review marked questions’ on the review sheet, he is directed to the first ‘marked for review’ question. However, on doing so, the previously marked answer gets erased. According to Nava, there is nothing to worry about as the CAT demo does not “actually record a candidate’s responses”. According to him, “The actual CAT will of course capture and record everything a candidate does so when he/she moves from one question to another, any previous response will be clearly shown on the screen”.
The pattern of the question paper will be as shown in the demo test i.e. the questions will be presented one by one as opposed to a list of questions. Candidates can skip the question(s) that they do not want to answer. They can also go to the review screen at any point during the exam to check what questions they have skipped or have marked for review. Nava says, “Our experience over the past 18 years has shown that presenting one question at a time is actually the preferred approach because it eliminates the need to scroll back and forth through an exam to locate a particular item”.