CAT 2008 Cut Offs

“This year in CAT 2008, the DI section with its deceptive level of difficulty was the toughest section and students faced maximum problems in this section,” say Career Launcher experts who predict the cut-off to be 26 for this section. IMS (range of 32-35)and Career Forum (cut-off: 32) believe that a minimum of 32 marks would be required to clear this section’s cut-off.

Faculty from IMS say, “The increase in the number of questions in the Verbal Ability section would have caught many by surprise, but this was offset by the fact that the questions were easier as compared to the last two years”. According to Munira Lokhandwala, “As the number of questions increased, ambiguous questions will play a smaller role in overall Verbal percentiles. Hence, students who are above average to good will do well in this section, despite the few ambiguous questions present.” Coaching institutes apart from TIME (cut-off predicted: 41-43) are at a consensus that a minimum score of 44 would be required to clear this year’s VA section. Career Launcher and IMS have released the range of cut-offs for the section as 44 and 46-49 respectively.

“Quantitative Ability proves to be on the difficult side again for an average student,” say faculty from Career Launcher. TIME predicts a cut-off in the range of 17-19 marks for this section of CAT 2008 while Career Launcher, IMS and PT have released cut-offs exceeding a net score of 30 for this section. “The overall difficulty level of this section was similar to last year with a slight but important difference. Questions that seemed easy had tricky answers and the ones that were not easy were anyways difficult to solve. So this section would see a high attempt rate but accuracy would be low,” comments Munira Lokhandwala.

Experts from Career Launcher put forth an interesting point, “One can also assume the larger number of verbal ability questions to be a reflection of the pattern followed by GMAT where verbal ability questions are almost as much in number as QA and LRDI put together. Are these signs of CAT going online?” Faculty from IMS comments, “The paper was overall on the easier side. The uneven number of questions across sections also meant that time management was crucial.” As far as overall cut-offs are concerned, IMS and Career Launcher predict that a score of 120 would be required for an IIM call while according to TIME a score range of 114-118 would suffice.

	Quantitative Ability	Data Interpretation	Verbal Ability	Overall
Career Launcher	30	26	44	120
IMS	32-35	32-35	46-49	120
TIME	17-19	27-29	41-43	114-118
PT	30	29	47-49	115-120
Career Forum	28	32	46	121