Management entrance exams test a student's aptitude and proficiency in the test areas like Verbal Ability,Quantitative Aptitude, Reading Comprehension,Data Interpretation,Data Sufficiency,Reasoning,General Awareness etc. However, the number of questions, sections, the duration of the exam, the number of questions from each area and the level of toughness of the paper varies from exam to exam.
The hallmark of most management entrance exams, especially exams like CAT, is the element of surprise. Therefore, even if a management entrance exam has what might seem as a set pattern in terms of questions over a few years, there is no guarantee that the same will hold good for the next year as well. No test pattern is sacrosanct and students would do well to prepare for any eventuality.
Now, lets look at different test areas that normally appear in management entrance tests and the preparation that you should put in for these areas. While the number of sections and the number of questions vary from test to test (or from year to year for the same entrance test), all entrance tests cover the following basic areas. The questions given in management entrance tests are all objective type multiple choice questions. The knowledge level required in all the areas for most management entrance exams is Tenth Standard level.
Verbal Ability
Verbal Ability is an area that is present in almost all the management tests. Questions in this area cover Vocabulary (Synonyms, Antonyms, etc), Grammar (Sentence Correction), Language Usage (Fill in the Blanks), Verbal Reasoning (Analogies, etc.). In some tests, there is a separate section for Verbal Ability whereas in some other tests, there is one section which includes both Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension.
In Reading Comprehension, students have to read passage(s) and answer questions that follow the passages. This area tests the ability of the student to quickly grasp what is being said in the passage before answering the questions. The length of each passage and the number of questions that follow a passage vary from exam to exam. The Reading Comprehension questions in an exam like CAT are normally considered to be more difficult than those in other entrance exams mainly because the passages range from abstract, philosophical, psychological to literary criticism, and the questions are generally inferential and implicit. To answer those questions requires a deep understanding of the passage.
In some tests, Reading Comprehension appears as a separate section whereas in some other exams, there could be one section which includes Reading Comprehension and Verbal Ability.
While the term Quantitative Ability is a very broad one covering any question that deals with figures and numbers, in the context of management entrance exams, most people use the terms Quantitative Ability or Quantitative Aptitude to refer to questions in Mathematics. This is an area that is present in almost every management entrance test. Students are tested on questions that are mostly of X Standard level - mainly in the areas of Arithmetic, Plane Geometry, Mensuration and Algebra. Sometimes, questions are also asked from Trigonometry, Co-ordinate Geometry, Permutation & Combination, and Probability.
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