How difficult is the Quantitative section of CAT for non-engineers?

The push for making the environments of B-Schools diverse in a lot of ways, be it social, gender and educational background, has changed the entrance exam and selection criteria a lot over the years. A reflection of that can be seen in the Quantitative section of the typical CAT paper, which has been witnessing a fall in the number of questions featuring higher and more complex concepts like Permutation and Combination in recent years, with about 80 percent of questions being assigned to concepts that are integral part of the curriculum up to10th standard.

Concepts like Arithmetic, Algebra, Profit and Loss, Time and Distance and others have been taking the lion’s share in the section for recent years. The easy to moderately tough questions are more in number, but the tougher ones are still tricky enough to hold candidates for much time if not prepared for and managed smartly.

However, this does not make the competition any easy. One still must keep following things in mind to do decent in this section:

  1. Though guessing the pattern of questions is a futile exercise, it always helps to have an idea about the last five years questions and topics touched.
  2. Concentrate on basic concepts of topics like Geometry, Time and Distance, Algebra and Arithmetic and practice all types of questions from these topics.
  3. Always take the best of the study materials that can explain the topic in detail and mock and practice tests to practice on standard questions and get a taste of the actual test environment.