Times of India has published an offline story in today’s Education Times, that says that this year number of questions in CAT 2021 will be decreased across all the sections. As per the news piece, this reduction in the number of questions will provide the candidate with ample time for their preparations for CAT 2021 exam.
MP Ram Mohan, Convenor CAT 2021 has been quoted as saying that although students who have appeared for the exam last year had no issues. However, citing the imposing of lockdown, the pressure of completing the CAT syllabus has become a nightmare for some. The pandemic has affected the performance of the students in a negative way owing to the reason that coaching classes were shut and a feeling of uncertainty hovered their minds.
As the pandemic is not yet over, and these shutdowns can be expected every now and then. Hence, reducing the number of questions from all the three sections i.e. QA, VARC and DI & LR in the CAT 2021 exam is the best solution to ease out the pressure and burden from the students.
Other than this, all other aspects of the exam i.e. time limit of 2 hours, syllabus and conducting of exam in 3 phases per day will not be changed. As of now, there is nothing mentioned, related to how many questions could be reduced per section, and all that will be announced shortly by the CAT 2021 convenor.
However, as per leading experts, we could see a dip of only 3 to 4 questions per section. This means right now a total of 76 questions are being asked in the exam but, with this decision it could happen that there are only 66 or 64 questions in the CAT 2021 examination. The complete pattern is expected to be announced in the upcoming weeks.
Similar to 2015, when IIM Ahmedabad was the convenor a lot of changes were introduced in the CAT exam like the introduction of an on-screen calculator, reduction in grammar-based questions, QA section was made more non-engineer friendly, etc. With this, we can expect a lot of surprising changes this year too.
However, the candidates must refrain from panic as only the number of questions will be shuffled and there are no major changes related to the syllabus. Also, since there will be a dip in the questions, the students could expect a rise in the difficulty level of the paper to balance the whole scenario.
