Endeavor Careers Posted on December 7, 2019

MICAT 2019 Analysis

MICAT (1) 2019 for admissions to MICA’s PGDM and PGDM-C programs for the year 2020 was conducted on 7^th December 2019.

Continuing its “parampara” of tinkering with the Psychometric test, MICAT this year increased the number of questions in it to 150 from only 27 last year.

MICAT 2019 paper-pattern was as shown in the table below:

MICAT (1) 2019 Paper Pattern
Parts	Sections	Number of Questions	Marks	Duration
Part 1	Psychometric	150	NA	30 minutes
Part 2	Descriptive Test	4	70	30 minutes
Part 3	Verbal Ability	25	105	1 hour and 45 minutes
	Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation	25
	General Awareness	25
	Divergent-Convergent Thinking (DCT)	30

Part 3 marking system: +1 and -0.25

The sectional, in-depth MICAT 2019 analysis is as follows:

Part 1: Psychometric Test:

MICAT 2019 went back to the conventional format of the Psychometric test. A total of 150 questions were to be answered in the time span of 30 minutes. Each of these questions had only 2 options. Out of these 150 questions, approximately 100 questions had Agree and Disagree as options and the rest had True and False as options.

Part 2: Descriptive Test:

This part can be further divided into 2 parts, the first part was “Argument or Opinion Writing” The topic this year was “Laziness”

This was followed by 3 questions, wherein the first question asked the aspirants to present 3 arguments detailing the benefits of being Lazy and 2nd question asked the aspirants to present 3 arguments detailing the harmful effects of Laziness.

Both these questions were of 10 marks each.

For the third question – Aspirants had to write down 3 points suggesting the ways in which One can reduce Laziness. These questions carried 20 marks.

The second part or the 4^th question of the Descriptive test was “Creative Writing” in which the aspirants had to connect 4 pictures, write a story and mention the sequence in which the pictures are used in the story.

The four pictures were of:

A Bee with a Camera
A Shopping complex with parked cars
Window Bars
Man crossing a road to reach a Shop.

This particular question carried 30 marks.

A total of 30 minutes were given to attempt the entire Section of Descriptive writing.

Part 3: Aptitude Test

This part had 105 questions and the time given for the same was 1 hour 45 mins. There was negative marking of 0.25 marks in this part.

The part can be further broken down into 4 sections namely:

Section 1: Divergent and Convergent Thinking:

This section had a total of 30 questions.

The approximate question distribution for this section is as below:

Sr. No.	Topic	No. of Qs.
1	Word Association	7
2	Statement and Assumption	5
3	Reasoning Based Data Sufficiency	5
4	Visual Reasoning	9
5	Analytical Reasoning	4
Total		30

Among these, 6 questions on Word Association and 4 questions on Analytical Reasoning were easy, 4 questions on Data Sufficiency can be classified as easy to moderate, whereas aspirants found the Statement-Assumption and Visual Reasoning based questions to be Difficult. One change that was evident was that the number of questions in Word Associations was reduced to 7 this year from 10 last year and the presence of Analytical reasoning based direct questions like the one based on Blood Relations.

Difficulty Level: Moderate

Ideal Attempts: 16-17

Ideal Time: 35 minutes

Section 2: Verbal Ability

This section had a total of 25 questions.

The approximate question distribution for this section is as below:

Sr. No.	Topic	No. of Qs.
1	Reading Comprehension	1 Passage – 5 Qs.
2	FIB – Cloze Based	1
3	Parajumbles	5
4	Grammar – Identify the Correct Sentence	1
5	Grammar – Sentence Correction	3
6	Synonyms	2
7	Antonym	2
8	FIB – Prepositions	2
9	Idioms and Phrases – Underlined in the sentence	4
Total		25

The Reading Comprehension passage was quite dense and 2 out of 5 questions were difficult as they had tricky options. Among the Parajumbles 3 questions can be termed easy, whereas the rest can be termed as Moderate. Of the total 7 Grammar – 1 Identifying the correct sentence, 3 Sentence Correction and 2 Preposition based Fill in the Blanks – 3 can be termed as easy whereas the rest were of Moderate difficulty level. The Synonyms and Antonyms questions can be termed as easy whereas 3 questions based on Idioms and Phrases we quite difficult.

Difficulty Level: Moderate

Ideal Attempts: 13-15

Ideal Time: 30 minutes

Section 3: Quant and Data Interpretation

This section had a total of 25 questions.

Sr. No	Topic	No. of Questions
1	Profit and Loss	2
2	Quadratic Equations	1
3	Ratio and Proportion	1
4	Alligation and Mixtures	1
5	Time and Distance	3
6	Permutation and Combination	3
7	Set Theory	1
8	Area – Volume	2
9	Heights and Distance	5
10	DI – 1 Set – Pie Charts	3
11	DI – 1 Set – Tables	3
Total		25

Among these 1 question each on Profit and Loss, Progression and Area-Volume can be classified as Difficult, whereas those based on Heights and Distance can be classified as Moderate. The rest of the questions were quite easy and the aspirants would have been quite happy with this section.

Difficulty Level: Easy

Ideal Attempts: 18-20

Ideal Time: 30 minutes

Section 4: General Awareness

This section also had 25 questions, of which surprisingly only 3 questions were based on brands, taglines, and advertising. Of the rest, there were around 2-3 questions on current affairs and remaining were based on static GK. In comparison to last year the General Awareness section, this year had more difficult questions.

Difficulty Level: Difficult

Ideal Attempts: 6-8

Ideal Time: 10 minutes

MICAT 2019 Cut-offs:

Please note that MICA only provides the Score of the “Aptitude Test” section in the final scorecard. It directly eliminates those students who do not clear the Psychometric Test.

Also, it would be important over here to note that MICA uses both CAT/XAT percentile and MICAT score to shortlist aspirants for Group Exercise and Personal Interviews. So the MICAT Cut-offs will vary as per the CAT/XAT Percentile.

An Aspirant getting 85+ percentile in CAT/XAT would need 42 Marks for a GEPI call from MICAT. An Aspirant getting between 85 and 80 percentile in CAT/XAT would need 47 marks, whereas the aspirant who gets between 70 and 80 percentile in CAT/XAT would need 52 marks.

Watch below video version of MICAT 2019 Exam Analysis