The CAT exam was held on 27th November 2022 in around 293 test centres, across 154 cities in India. It was held in three slots and the duration of the exam was 120 minutes. The time allotted for each section was 40 minutes. Around 2.5 lakh candidates registered for the test and 2.2 lakh candidates (approximately 87%) appeared for the exam.

Pattern
Changes in the pattern and difficulty level
There were slight changes in the exam pattern this year



VARC - there was a new type of question, Sentence Insertion, which appeared this year. There were two MCQ questions of this type. Here, we were given a sentence and a paragraph, and had to choose where to insert the sentence. It was of easy-medium difficulty range and required some logic to insert the sentences into a specific blank. Here is a sample question from Slot 3.



In VARC, the RC questions were not direct, it needed some extra effort to carefully read and understand the question before answering them. The summary questions across all three slots were tricky making it difficult to answer.

DILR - there were five questions for each set unlike four or six questions like last year. There were four sets with 5 questions each. Most candidates solved 0-2 cases.

QA - the pattern for the QA section remained the same. It was moderately difficult for Slot 2 and Slot 3, Slot 1 was easier.

Exam Analysis The student feedback and the feedbacks of the Mockat Coaches are mentioned in the table above

Slot 1: VARC was hard, sentence insertion was a surprise. QA was easy.
Slot 2: All sections were moderately difficult, QA section was conceptual.
Slot 3: It was a moderately difficult slot, QA section was calculation/algebraic driven. VARC was easy.

The DILR section was hard across all three slots as compared to the previous years. We expect the overall cut off score to drop this year.

Sources:
IIM CAT
Media Release