MH- CET MBA 2019 Analysis

MH-CET for MBA/MMS Institutes in Maharashtra was on 9th and 10th March 2019. There were two slots a day, in 36 centres inside Maharashtra and 13 centres outside. The test this year had 1,12,000 registrations, which was 7000 more than the CET-2018 registrations. IBPS, the body designing Test for DTE, maintained the Test toughness even this year, with the section questions split the same as 2018. The result will be declared on 31st March 2019 with CAP rounds scheduled in the month of May. Most students found the test lengthy. It was a paper, in which a score of 120 to 125 marks should fetch 99+ percentile. The test pattern:

Each question carried 1 mark, with no negative marking for the incorrect responses. The time allotted was two and a half Hours. The Test was well designed; we did not get any reports from students about operational glitches. The Level of difficulty in all the four slots was about the same. This should keep students happy, even after scores normalization. Here are our observations on the four sections of CET-2019.

There were four/five DI Sets with 20/25 questions. CET, even this year, had one DI set that was Math driven. Overall, the test setter ensured that questions from most chapters of math got covered in Data sufficiency, Quantitative comparisons and traditional Math questions. The section had lesser coverage on Basic Arithmetic and Algebra. Questions from Work and Time, Speed and Ratio were more this year. It’s normally the opposite in most other exams. The questions were all conventional, but calculation driven. The Q.A. section this year looked easier, may be because the L.R. was tougher. The students comfortable in Q.A. were happy attempting all 50 questions in 60mins.

This section was the talk of the town for a couple of days. LR has been the strength of most students. The students dependent on LR were in a fix! The Data-arrangement or the Puzzles were time consuming, although the other LR sets were manageable. A score of 55+ will be an achievable by students who did nothing but LR for the last two months. Lesser mortals, should be happy to settle for less. A student had to read a lot in the directions before she started the paper. The directions looked like legalese meant to pre-empt court cases. In a test of 150 minutes, with a higher level of competition this year, students who were slow in reading would have found it to be a big disadvantage. Some new sets were added in the second slot of day one. So an element of surprise was there for all students.

The passages were moderate and lengthy for the 5 questions that were associated with a passage. There were more inferential questions than factual. There was a surprise in the sentence correction part. CET did not have “Spot the error” in the form of ‘Part error’, but a 5-6 lines paragraph that had three places in the paragraph where the underlined parts were to be corrected. The options had different combinations of these three parts. Along with this, a novelty this year was Vocabulary, where students were asked to check correct usage. Students, especially voracious readers, found this interesting.

This section had a mix of easy to moderate questions. Most questions were of the series continuation type and needed some non-conventional approaches to wrap them up within a minute. Although there were no surprises this year, the logic needed to decode the pattern wasn’t easy. Yet a score of 15 in 20 is quite doable in this section.

The message from CET 2019 was clear: What is expected is not a volcano of ideas, but consistent practice!