Disappointed with IMS and SimCATs ...

[anuj0000]

An Analysis of the mother of all aptitude tests i.e. SIMCAT (not the CAT you duffer)

Hi,

I have been an irregular member of this website on account of not so easily accessible net access, but what has happened to me in the past week has infuriated me enough to sit at a cyber cafe for a long enough time and write this. I am one of those regular students who wants to give the CAT this year and do well. I studiously prepare as much as I can in a day, take section tests, comprehensive tests, read the newspaper, do vedic math, do some calculations, etc. I have been trying my sincere best to do whatever I can to crack it as they say. After the SIMCAT 1, I was very depressed and thought lets learn from this and prepare again so that I can crack the next SIMCAT. But After SIMCAT2, I thought I will give up my preparation for the CAT altogether.That’s when I spoke to a friend; he has a mentor who teaches in another institute. I spoke to him at length and this is what I got to know from him:

1. If you go through any of the previous years CAT papers (they are easily available in the market) you will see that in the past few years there were NO questions involving derivatives, sine rule, cosine rule, usage of sin(A+B) formulae, etc. What exactly is the SIMCAT trying to achieve by giving us these? Its very easy to make questions of a higher knowledge level so that students can’t answer them rather than make them of a 10th std knowledge level but make them difficult.

And the CAT practice of restricting questions to the 10th Std also makes perfect sense, because the IIMs want good students across categories, not only from engineering.

2. Even the English is not representative, there used to be a separate section in RC that may have been removed to avoid giving students from arts background an advantage.But why should IMS remove the RC section so that they put RC like summaries in the verbal section?

Till here the discussions is academic and someone can always argue in terms of academic flexibility and try to justify things but the next two points have really outraged me.

3. I was led to believe that my IMS professor in Ruia, he takes classes in Sion also, is from IIMC. This I found out is false. There is another lady teacher who takes Verbal, whos is supposed to be from IIMB. This was also a lie. I then did some asking around and found out that most of the Math teachers are engineers!

How exactly can people who have not been able to crack it teach us how to crack it?

4. The top most levels of management are mainly graduates only or have done their management from some exotic country! Case in point being the top guy Kamlesh Sajnani. And I was led to believe that this is an organizations run by people who’ve aced the CAT themselves. I am still searching for them.

Why do these guys have to lie to us when we are joining? I was stunned to find out that most of the faculties in Bombay have NOT cleared the CAT. Oh, they do have centre managers who are from the IIM but what’s the use of having a centre manager who’s cleared the CAT when they are not teaching?

What has enraged me enough to write this mail was that I could have easily GIVEN UP on my CAT preparation, and so would a lot of students, (refer to postings which say I suck, I suck, etc) simply because of the way the SIMCATs are being prepared. This posting is for all students like us let us realize that the problem lies in the paper which is too tough and quite out of syllabus and not with us.

Let us again start preparing with the best of spirits,

I hope it helps.

Anuj

[Stefan R]

Hi Anuj,

All I can say is that we get enough reasons in life to complain about. Be smart, and extract what is best for you. People have secured admissions in IIMs by just following IMS, or for that matter any one of the coaching material.

I know of a guy who failed miserably in all SIMCATs in 2001, and ended in IIM A.

If you ask my opinion, I would rate IMS material as fair, very good VA/RC, good DI/Logic and not so bad Quant. Still if possible you can go through TIME's quant material especially on number theory, and inequalities.

Hoping to see you crack CAT, and then let us all know how you did it

[doofus3]

so you are saying we ditch ims and join this "other institute" of yours?
why??
its you who are facing the problems. not us. CAT is completely unpredictale. there have been cases where geometric probablity has been asked so dont ask ppl to stay in cocoons saying that this is the portion and that is the portion.

the simcats are on the tougher side and even in the answers thats acknowledged. how you take it or life in general depends on you! if you see the world negatively then you are never going to succeed.

if this is some ambush attack on ims then i personally think its not gonna work coz it has been around for ages and almost everybody has some brother, friend, cousin who cracked CAT and has attended IMS.

[vinz]

i agree....

papers might be tough..but they r preparing u for the worst and thats the best prep u can get....u will be trained not to be fazed by anything on the D-Day........If u take it negatively, its ur fault....

And then this is a relative exam.......ur performance will be based on how everyone has performed...so the paper might be easy or tough will be the same for everyone.....you r not the only one whos SIMCATs are going bad......but then i havent seen anyone give up........If u give up so early in life dude, what will happen when u r bury 15 hrs a day at B-Schools !!

So stop complaining abt the quality of papers and focus on where u r going wrong......even if u score a 30 in any simcat but if its still 90+ percentile, u shud feel glad..........Preparations thru a tough paper is certainly better than attempting time pass papers and ending up with a surprise on the D-Day with a tricky paper.....

Theres no need to feel disgusted...U r much better than all those u have got lower percentiles than u..if they r not complainin, why r u ? See the brighter side and concentrate on ur performance...Rest everything will take care of itself....

[cattiee]

so you are saying we ditch ims and join this "other institute" of yours?
why??
its you who are facing the problems. not us

Hey ,

And i thought futuristic managers knew How to put forth their point !!

Cheers.

[saurabhgupta]

Originally Posted by cattiee

Hey ,

And i thought futuristic managers knew How to put forth their point !!

Cheers.

i totally agree with cattie .. although i have no malice towards IMS or for that matter any other institution, but there is a point beyond which the level of difficulty cannot be increased.
The present student population has seen a wild upsurge in the number of CAT aspirants.

i remember NIKUNJ sir from IMS told me that there were roughly 30000 CAT aspirants in 1997 and last year i.e. 2004 we had something in excess of 1.5 lakhs ..

in such a scenario it becomes inevitable for any coaching institution to attract students ... irrespective of their standard and quality ....

hence POOR INPUT GIVES RISE TO POOR OUTPUT ...

so sometimes they have a lack of faculty .. hence ... they recruit less qualified teachers and smartly camouflage their qualifications ....

i think IMS has been the oldest CAT TUTORIAL IN INDIA ...but god knows .. what made them resort to such maligned measures ...

AS for the level of difficulty is concerned ... YES I agree that PREMIER INSTITUTIONS ARE NOT LOOKING FOR SHAKESPEAREAN ENGLISH ... BUT BASIC .. UNDERSTANDING CAPABILITIES IN ALL MANAGEMENT ASPIRANTS ...

THE SAME REASONING GOES FOR QUANT AND .. EVEN DI ...

its not about calculation .. but all about decision making capacity ... to attempt or not to attempt ...

this year TIME is working very hard to hit the nail on its head in its bid to prepare a CAT paper as similar as possible to CAT ...

i am a test series student at CAREER LAUNCHER .. AND I THINK THEIR MOCKS ARE WORTH A READ ..

[radix]

hi everyone,

first thing, anuj.......... dont get disheartened... i am going thru a similar phase......
just my 2 cents: concentrate on the final 2 hours, thry may change ur life..
they almost did change mine last yr..

in some ways, i do agree..........
ims has the uncanny knack of coming up with simcats that defy the recent trends seen in the actual CAT. If the logic is to give a tougher experience to us, then its welcome.. but, i feel that, in the process they are failing to give us something like the REAL thing.

Last yr, i took the simcats and also cl mocks....... and after taking the CAT, i feel CL was closer to the real thing..

the bottomline is:u also have to be ready to crack CAT, if it is anything like the standard that CL/Time have..
lets not forget how to do the average difficulty level papers..

radix

[doofus]

Hey folks..

Long time..since i last replied to any thread here.

Anyways, coming to the point..I do agree to a certain extent that offlate, the SIMCATs arent the same they were earlier. Making questions that are 'tough conceptually' ( and i mean where the working might just take a couple of minutes - its the cracking that might take time) is one thing but giving questions where the students are merely spending time in calculations is another and thats precisely what we are seeing is happening more and more in the SIMCATs. Acc. to me its not suiting the purpose.
And Yes, I do believe that Time and Career Launcher have worked very hard over on their Mock Cats and improved the level considerably.

The views are my own and in no ways have i made any attempts to denigrate anyone here.
I myself am a SIMCAT student and have benefitted immensely from them.

Let Peace Prevail.

[doofus]

And one more thing folks!!


Lets not be harsh in our words on anyone. The guy is down and feeling low. Maybe not everything thats expressed is in sync with our views.

[anuj0000]

if this is some ambush attack on ims then i personally think its not gonna work coz it has been around for ages and almost everybody has some brother, friend, cousin who cracked CAT and has attended IMS.

hey man, this is no ambush attack against ims, they are too big for some obscure student like me to make a difference, what has outraged me is the fact that even if the papers are tough the reason for the toughness, is not some good concept but a very difficult calculation, also rarely in PS in the actual CAT do you have answers in decimals or lengthy calculations. I am a Mech engg and it would be very easy for me to make fifteen to twenty questions of the IMS simcat difficulty level. So I do not see any greatness in making such questions, if you see the actual CAT (I am actually trying to avoid comparisons with other institutes) the problems have some twist to a good but basic concept. Any institutes job is to introduce and familiarize us to these twists (for which of course they have to put some effort and come up with genuinely good problems), and not make us go through grotesques calculations because 99% that wont help us in CAT.
Please look at the fact that I am still positive about my CAT prep and I will crack it (most probably by ignoring more Sims) will let you know how.

Anuj