CAT 2023 Comprehensive Analysis

CAT 2023 was smoothly conducted, overall, this year on the expected lines. The pattern of the exam was the same as CAT 2022 and there were no noticeable surprises in that regard. The evaluation scheme was the same as that of the earlier years - Three marks for a correct answer and a penalty of a mark for a wrongly marked MCQ. Non-MCQs had no negative marks. While the number of non-MCQs in the VARC section was 4 in each section, in the DILR and QA sections, the number varied slightly across different slots.

The difficulty, overall, for CAT 2023 in the morning slot was slightly on the higher side compared to that of all of the slots of the two previous CATs. The afternoon and evening slots were slightly easier overall compared to the morning slot, although the difference in difficulty was not that significant, although the evening slot had a relatively tougher Quant section.

Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension:

Compared to last year, this year’s VARC section was a little easier. Last year, there were many passages that were difficult or dense to read but most passages this year were relatively easier to read and understand. The afternoon slot candidates had a surprise with one of the Para Odd Man Out questions being highlighted as mandatory. This was marked with a * symbol beside the question number in the Question palette. The candidates in the morning and evening slots did not see this and so, it is speculated that this could be a technical error or glitch. However, there is no official confirmation on the same at the moment.

While the difficulty of the RC part varied a bit across the three slots, the difference was not much. All the slots had at least two passages that were easy or moderately difficult to read and understand. However, even the easier passages had difficult questions, increasing the difficulty of the RC part. There were a lot of critical reasoning questions and inference-based questions of the type, “All…true or can be inferred…EXCEPT”. Further, several questions had options that were too close to each other, which made eliminating the wrong choices difficult. As a result, confidently answering the questions was difficult.

The VA part had four question types – Para Formation, Para Odd Man Out, Para Summary and Sentence Placement – with two questions of each question type. This was a slight deviation from the previous years, which had only three question types. The difficultly of the VA part was moderate in all the slots. However, thanks to a difficult RC part, the cutoffs are expected to be a little low.

Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning:

The DILR section this year had the same pattern as last year’s DILR – 4 sets with 5 questions each. There was no clear distinction between DI and LR sets this year as there were hardly any sets that were purely LR based. Most sets in each slot involved a fair number of calculations. A notable feature of the DILR section this year was that there were no sets on graphs or charts. The key to scoring high was selecting the right sets but there were no definitely-easy and must-attempt sets this year.

The overall difficulty of this year’s DILR was higher than that of last year’s DILR. Most of the sets involved a lot of reasoning and were time consuming. One small difference between last year’s DILR and this year’s is that last year, all the sets had common information that was lengthy to read. This year, there were sets like that but there were also sets that did not have a lot of information. Luckily, these were the easiest sets in the section. But even the doable sets required a good amount of time and reasoning on the students’ part. The evening and afternoon slots’ paper, while difficult, were relatively easier than the morning slot.

A majority of the sets in each slot were Quant Based Reasoning sets and students who were expecting at least one or two sets from familiar topics like Arrangement, Selections or Venn Diagrams might have felt a tad disappointed. However, some of the problem models in this year’s CAT have been asked across AIMCATs and those who have taken a good number of AIMCATs would have managed to take on some of these sets. In the morning slot, there was one set that required students to have prior knowledge of Statistics beforehand. In the evening slot, there were no such questions. All of these things made for an extremely difficult DILR section. Therefore, the cutoffs are expected to be low for the DILR section too.

Quantitative Reasoning:

The Quant section across all the slots was significantly tougher than last year’s Quant. Students in the afternoon slot might have braced themselves a bit after having heard feedback from the morning slot candidates. But the evening slot candidates did not have this respite as they still had to deal with a really difficult paper. Overall, students had to be hands-on with multiple topics as a lot of questions required students to apply concepts across different topics. A majority of the questions were from Algebra and Arithmetic. While the morning and afternoon slots had more questions from Algebra, the evening slot had more questions from Arithmetic. The number of questions from Geometry in each slot was 3 or 4. There were no questions from Modern Maths.

A good number of questions appeared to be easy at the outset but a lot of them required students to go through some elaborate steps before they arrived at the answer. There were hardly any questions that could be solved by simply substituting values in formulae or using standard problem approaches. The evening slot paper was the toughest of the three slots. While the morning and afternoon slots had a lot of questions where the student had to work out quite a bit, the questions in the evening slot required students to have conceptual clarity. Even students who were good at Quant would have had trouble attempting more than 10-12 questions. As a result, the cutoff in all the slots is expected to be really low.

The cut-offs across slots are expected to be as below:

VARC Percentiles
Percentile	Morning	Afternoon	Evening
85	16	18	19
95	25	27	28
99	35	38	38

DILR Percentiles
Percentile	Morning	Afternoon	Evening
85	10	12	13
95	15	17	19
99	25	28	30

QA Percentiles
Percentile	Morning	Afternoon	Evening
85	9	9	8
95	16	15	14
99	25	24	23

The overall scores for various percentiles across slots are expected to be as below:

Overall Scores
Percentile	Morning	Afternoon	Evening
95	48	54	54
97.5	57	62	64
99	67	73	75

Disclaimer: All information on cut-offs, analysis, and scores are based on independent analysis and evaluation made by T.I.M.E. based on student inputs about the exam. We do not take responsibility for any decision that might be taken, based on this information.