At 83.6%, turnout for CAT 2016 up from last year

Last year turnout stood at 82%; registrations too were up by 6% this year

Over 195,000 candidates took the Common Admission Test (CAT) 2016, the gate to all Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and other B-schools across 138 cities on Sunday.

With this, CAT 2016 saw the overall turnout go up from 82 per cent last year to 83.6 per cent this year, said CAT officials, who added that the test was conducted glitch free despite concerns of heavy rains in Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu.

The total registrations this year had closed at over 233,000, up by six per cent over last year. CAT 2015 registrations had closed at 218,664 last year.

Conducted on Sunday, December 4 across 138 cities in two testing windows, the test was divided into three sections, including Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC), Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning (DILR) and Quantitative Ability (QA) with 34, 32 and 34 questions, respectively. Each section had a time limit of 60 minutes.

As per CAT officials, the test was conducted in glitch-free manner, with no incidents of time loss for candidates being reported.

According to an analysis by CAT training institute T.I.M.E., for CAT2016, the IIMs this year went with the same pattern as in 2015 both in terms of the number of questions in each section and in terms of the difficulty level of the sections.

Ramnath Kanakadandi, course director CAT at T.I.M.E., while the QA section carried moderate difficulty, VARC and DILR turned out to be difficult and very difficult.