CAT 2010- The experience

After all that I went through for my CAT exam, I thought it best to put my experiences here, so you can all have an idea of how it was. . If the exam weren’t so serious, it would have actually been funny!


So here goes….

The night before the exam, I got cold feet about my admit card which said I should bring a photo identification with a name that exactly matched the name on my admit card. The problem was that my driving-license and my college id had the name yeshwanti, while I’d entered yeshwanthi on my cat form. Fearing a possible disqualification, my dad and I went affidavit-hunting that night… and got it. If that was freaky, read on for more..

The most anticipated and the most dreaded day dawned on November 7th. I woke up early and put on my thickest jacket (for it was cold outside and I dint want that to disturb me during the exam). My dad thought mosquitoes could be a greater source of disturbance and bought me this Odomos cream. I packed stationary, voucher, photo ids, affidavit, etc and set out for THE EXAM centre (veltech engineering college)

I reached the centre at 8.00am along with Cyclone JAL, that was in its full form! We (test takers) were huddled under the entrance dome for half an hour before we were called inside, and I heard strange sounds from people next to me (which I later realized were from their chattering teeth). Thank god, I had my jacket!



After all the formalities of identity checking, pocket checking etc, we were seated in front of our respective terminals, given scratch papers and pencils and were instructed not to write anything on the paper until the exam started.

But I, being the bum that I was, wrote my time allocation strategy in one corner of the sheet.

2.15 – 1.35 – ps

1.35- 0.55- di

0.55-0.15—va/rc

(Being CAT prep students, I’m sure you understood the above jargon)

Then we were asked to click the START MY TEST tab, and my terminal was taking a long time to load! During this time, I kinda closed my eyes to pray and calm my nerves, and was asleep in no time!!!

The invigilator woke me up and pointed out that the computer had to be restarted as I’d slept through some of the processes to start the test.. During this, another irksome invigilator noticed the writing on my scratch sheet and threatened to report me for violation of rules!!

All this made me terribly tensed. I took up the exam in a state I’d never imagined I’d be… I could see all my self-talks and exercises to remain calm on D-Day, going up in smoke. Nothing was helping.

I realized then that if fate had preordained me to be tensed on the CAT day, that’d happen, no matter what!

But to my relief, the Quants section (the one I usually suck at) turned out to be easy… Most of the questions were from numbers and basic arithmetic. Despite my nerves, I attempted around 10 questions there. DI wasn’t bad either. The questions were long, but were pretty direct… I attempted 10 questions there too. Next came the English section, my strength (as I call it). There were three passages, of which I attempted two. The rest were the usual vocab questions, no surprises there!

On the whole, I think I attempted around 35 questions….

Once out of the hall, I explained to the invigilator that I’d written down the time strategy and nothing else. He was okay with it, I guess..

Well.. So that’s my story.. I just have to wait and watch or hope for the best or blah blah...

And thanks dad, mom, and friends who stayed by me all the time...



Tada!

And Good luck 

yesh