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MBA For
Dummies By Rachit Sharma Just who the hell am I? Am I an IIM
alumni? No. Am I a management professor? Nope. Am I a big shot in the corporate world?
Negative.
As even the dumbest amongst you would or should know, the CAT consists of four categories, namely: Quantitative Ability, Reading Comprehension, Verbal Ability and Data Interpretation. Now, we shall tackle them one at a time. First comes Quantitative Ability—a complicated way of saying Maths!—which forms the very crux of the paper. Anyone not figuring in the top five of their class, as far as maths is concerned, can kiss good-bye any realistic chance of getting through and start praying for a miracle. For engineers this section, due to their previous trysts with advanced number crunching, is a cakewalk. Others are advised to go take a walk. Where’s the cake, you ask? Well, on your face if you don’t bail out now! Secondly, there’s Reading Comprehension; the word ‘boring’ pales to insignificance compared to this section! You have to go through four or five long passages on some irrelevant and completely ridiculous topics, and as if that weren’t enough, answer some equally inane questions bearing a remote relation to the passages. For you to get the answers right, your mind must be identical to that of the person who has set the paper. And considering that he is most probably an IIM alumni, brilliant, experienced and most importantly, a good 30 to 40 years older than you, don’t you think that’s asking for a bit too much? Some consolation to non-engineers (if any made it till here), is that engineers totally loathe this section and you people normally perform better than they do anyway; which is like saying that you are taller than Mickey Mouse! Still not tall enough, eh? For those who are still going for the exam (morons! ) there's only one thing I can say -smile, because tomorrow's gonna be worse! Next comes Verbal Ability, in which you can exhibit your mastery over English. Easy, you say? Well, yes, if you have just come from Oxford, otherwise it’s tough as hell. First, you have to join five or six sentences to form a coherent passage, the problem being that there always seems to be more than one combination fulfilling this condition. And then you have to know the meaning of some common words, normally used in our day-to-day conversation like Sequoia, Totipalmate, Zygopleural (Huh?!!) etcetera. Easy, eh? Last, but definitely not least, comes the Data Interpretation section, notorious for the time it consumes. You are hammered with a barrage of data in every sort of shape and size imaginable. You have to find and somehow calculate their value ten years hence. A future-teller, I’m not! As if we hadn’t been tortured enough, some institutions (curse them!) have an extra section devoted to GK. Yup! General Knowledge, a subject which almost all of us, especially engineers (do I hear shouts of jubilation from the few non-engineers left?) simply love to hate. You are supposed to know about happenings and facts from all parts of the globe which, in all probability, are never going to help you in your managerial tasks. So, why bother, you ask? Well, since much of the course they teach is equally irrelevant and redundant, they just want to ascertain your capacity to store rubbish in your memory bank. If you still manage to scrape through the exam (hey, you’re smarter than you look, buddy!), don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. The worst is still to come in the form of Group Discussions and interview. But, more on that some other time. Before I sign off, I’ll answer the one
query that must have been hounding you for quite some time now—just who the hell am
I? Am I am IIM alumni? No. |
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I bet all you IIM aspirants have already
enrolled yourselves in some coaching centre or another, smug in the knowledge that your
institution has had over 70 percent of its students admitted in top-notch B-schools over
the past years. Hey, wake up dum-dum! Someone’s got to make up the remaining 30
percent and it could well be you! If you want to find out whether you have what it takes
to get through, read on.