CMAT

All About CMAT All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has conducted the first Common Management Admission Test (CMAT) in 2012 over a 9 day window in 61 cities across India from 20th February to 28th February. The conduct of the test was reported to be smooth. The test, which was conducted in the online mode with Aptech as the technology partner, is considered a success, for 3 reasons - the largely glitchfree conduct, the huge number of schools (2000+) which will be using CMAT for admissions, and unlike other Management tests of this kind, the opportunity it provides the students to get into some of the well known B-Schools. AICTE has announced that CMAT will be conducted twice a year and newspaper reports indicate that the 2nd CMAT this year may be conducted in August/September. Eligibility Criteria: For General Category graduates from any discipline, 50% of marks is required (45% for reserved category students). Final year students of Graduate Courses can also apply. About the Test: There are four sections in the test. The sections are (a) Logical Reasoning b)Verbal Ability / Language Comprehension c)Numerical Ability + Data Interpretation d) General Awareness. There are 25 questions in each section. The duration of test is 180 minutes, with no break during this time window. So, students could move back and forth between sections, unlike CAT & NMAT this year. This meant that the sections were not timed individually, and the onus was on the students to manage timing between the sections, while ensuring that they showed their competency in all the sections. There is negative marking of 1 mark for every wrong answer. A sample test with 6 questions is available on the CMAT website.(http://www.aicte-cmat.in/) Paper Pattern: Section No. 1 2 3 4 Total Section Name Quantitative Techniques and Data Interpretation Logical reasoning Language comprehension General Awareness No. of questions 25 25 25 25 100 Marks per section 100 100 100 100 400

Duration of the exam : 3 hours Negative Marking : 1 mark per wrong answer

Going by the feedback received from the test takers, the difficulty level of the exam seems to be more or less consistent across slots during the 9 day test window. Candidates opined that they were caught off guard by the Sections General Awareness and Verbal Ability - the questions were of much higher difficulty level than they anticipated. Though the sections Quantitative Ability + Data Interpretation and Logical Ability were believed to provide some respite, accuracy and interpreting the questions correctly were seen to be essential for a good score in these sections. Going by the official scores, students seemed to have paid the price of taking these sections easy,there by falling in the trap of some of the tricky questions. Though the student community at large felt that the exam was of moderate difficult level, students cannot afford to take it easy, if they are aiming for a seat in one of the well known institutes.

Scoring Mechanism CMAT will rank its takers based on both the Over all test score and individual sectional scores. Those with high overall scores will get better ranks. Ties will be decided based on the performance of the students in the individual sections Those who scored better in Quant will get better ranks. Logical Reasoning, English Comprehension and General Awareness follow the Quant section in the pecking order to decide a tie. Refer to http://www.aicte-cmat.in/1.pdf for more details.