CAT 2013 kicks off without any glitches

INDORE: The Common Admission Test (CAT) 2013 started on Wednesday with not more than 150 students taking the examination on the first day at the only centre in the city. Being festival days, most of the students thought it to be auspicious to get their names enrolled between October 25 and 30.
The examination did not throw many surprises to aspirants as the pattern was almost similar to that of last year.While section one that includes Quantitative Ability (QA) and Data Interpretation (DI) gave them a tough time, section two containing Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning proved to be a smooth sail.
Himanshu Sharma, who appeared in CAT said 70 minutes given for section one, was not enough to attempt it. "The difficulty level was high this year. Although I am satisfied with my performance, I could have solved 2-3 more questions from the QA section had it been of a moderate difficulty level. But the questions were tough with complicated calculation and I did not want to do any guess work," Sharma said. Sharing similar experiences, Chetan Patidar, another aspirant, who appeared for CAT on Wednesday, said, "Section one was tough and the difficulty level increased this year. But section two was easy and it compensated well for the level of section one."
Though many have resisted appearing in the examination, fearing pattern and difficulty level of examination, the number of aspirants taking test is expected to see a rise after the first lot of aspirants shared their experiences. There are three centres in the state, which includes two in Bhopal and one in Indore. Akash Sethia, a coaching expert, said, "Questions related to geometry, function and mensuration were in good number. The conventional pattern of questions on logarithm, arithmetic etc was not in the paper."
Talking about the examination process this year, he said toughness level was a bit high this year. However, what surprised him this year is the reduced number of standard questions asked in each slot. He said, "The number of standard questions asked in the examination remained less this year. Unlike last year, aspirants have experienced different sets of question in different slots."
CAT convener, Rohit Kapoor, said, "The examination was glitch-free across all the centres in the country. More number of students are likely to appear in the coming days."