6 posts tagged “cat”

Only Dream: I just want to be one among them and be a part of famous alumnus…J

Hello…. World….J

It’s been very long time I hadn’t updated my status…on preparation front.

Please forgive me…oops! With whom I’m begging this, absolutely not at all require to mention. Because I think, I’m the owner of my own destiny!

Well….let me tell you all these days, I was busy with my object deliverable with my client.

Thank god there’s not much of problem while performing UAT (user acceptance test)...I’m successfully completed my FIRST object under Finance module…J

Just today I got an appreciation mail from my great client…J

For your kind information, even I’m also done with this year’s performance appraisal and the news is I’m happy my PM, given me rating as 3.3 on 4 …that means, I’m exceeded my boss’s…expectations ..J .. Well…well…all-in-all my job going fine. I’m happy with it.

Now come to the actual serious business of my life…yeah, it is...undoubtedly.

Hmmm…frankly speaking, preparation is not that bad at all, but the lone problem with it is just trying hard to maintain consistency… level. Omg! Maintaining consistency level is one of the horrendous job a person can do, I guess…really difficult achieve but its enough in fact, great if we maintain at least 99% consistency level  considering the fact that we all are humans…J

Finally, let me  quickly update on the core tasks of my serious business…called

 ‘CAT-Hunting’…&  

First let me give details about my difficult part of business: VA & RC.

Yeah….as I know this is the serious sector to watch out for so I’m putting lot of efforts sincerely …

i.                    keep updating the Vocal( say word list)

ii.                  Solid Reading

iii.                Yet to start English usage…I’m sure I’ll start ASAP.

Now come to my next most prioritised sector: DI & LR

Well…I’m doing well in LR but for time being I stopped doing DI, reason behind that as I’m still not met the Speed Maths technique criteria’s where I should be little more quick enough to complete the calculation part.

Daily wise schedule: except weekends, where the preparation level is high.

i.                    Daily solving 1 to 2 LR problem

ii.                  Alternative day I’m trying to do some more sets from TIME.

iii.                Daily I’m doing, I’ll do in fact I got to do this Speed Maths techniques until I take mockCAT‘s.

At last my fine sector in the whole business called…: QA

I was regularly doing this task honestly though I infrequently not meet this because of lacklustre life style in the mornings... (Omg! Getting regularly morning…5.00pm is really taking toll…) of course it’s not the same case with night schedules.

Finally over all picture, I say my preparation level is satisfactory in fact, you can add GOOD…J..

Well….i knows, there’s no room for complacency… I’m sure I’ll improve to the best of my level…and trying to get rating as the BEST…J

Thanks world…for listening all my gossip... L for most of the people, but for me right now that’s only matters most.

Oops….i forgot to thanks my VOX.

I love you so much for so many reasons.

Have a great weekend….to the world and happy preparation to ME.

IN DEFENSE OF MBAS Businessmen grouse about them, but the best ones have financial skills that corporations badly need.

Dumping on MBAs has become increasingly popular in recent years, both in the popular press and in specialized publications such as the Harvard Business Review. Newly minted MBAs, the critics say, are too ambitious, too impatient, and not worth the high salaries they command. I often hear similar complaints from senior managers and corporate directors. My short answer to these criticisms is that MBAs need no defense because their offense has been so successful. The marketplace has spoken: new MBA graduates with a few years' work experience command salaries as high as $70,000 a year, and even without on-the-job experience the top graduates from the premier business schools start at around $50,000. Consulting firms, investment banks, commercial banks, and large industrial companies presumably court these MBAs with such princely offers because their predecessors have proved to be worth it (and, presumably, because employers aren't really eager to find patient, unambitious young managers). My free-market orientation convinces me that this rebuttal is correct, yet the disappointment with MBAs is obvious and widespread. Why all the grousing from the managers paying these big salaries? I suspect that it arises from experience with the mediocre graduates who come out of even the best schools, and with the legion of MBAs churned out of lesser institutions. Some employees always prove disappointing, whether they have MBAs, B.A.s, or engineering or law degrees. But the smart students coming out of the top schools are equipped with new financial skills that can help any company improve its performance. How can employers monitor the quality of business education and identify the MBAs who deserve the accolades and the dollars? The easiest way is to stick with graduates of the schools that have been primarily responsible for disseminating the new learning in finance that has developed over the last two decades. By my lights, these schools are the University of Chicago, MIT's Sloan School, the University of Rochester, and UCLA. Moving strongly in this direction are Stanford, Wharton, Berkeley, Northwestern, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, New York University, and Harvard. The different ways that business schools train managers explain why MBAs are not created equal. Most business education falls into two broad categories. The first has a descriptive, institutional bent. Its purpose is to provide students with knowledge of current business practices, conventions, and -- though certainly not the intent of its proponents -- popular myths. This approach, which prevails at most state universities and many other schools, often is combined with an excessive reliance on the case study method pioneered at Harvard. Case studies, which force students to work through abbreviated versions of actual business situations, are designed to produce experienced decision makers. The exercise of making decisions under pressure is supposed to generate the best managerial talent, regardless (so it seems) of the validity of the reasoning underlying the decision. Business schools copied the case study method used in law schools, where it has long been extremely useful. In law schools, going to past cases means going to original sources, just as rigorous historians go to original documents. But, as Professor James Lorie of Chicago has pointed out, the use of cases in business education is little more than a vicarious and attenuated apprenticeship. And apprenticeship ceased long ago to be the predominant mode of education in almost all serious disciplines. By contrast, the second category of business education is fundamentally scientific in its methods. Known as the Chicago school or quantitative approach, it attempts to imbue the student with a valid theoretical understanding of business decisions -- not only of how such decisions usually are reached, which is where the institutional approach usually leaves off, but how they ought to be reached. The quantitative approach begins with the assumption that those business practices that have survived the test of time have good economic justifications. It then attempts to separate the real economic reasons from the popular myths. THIS APPROACH recognizes that before the student can adapt decision-making skills to specific, unforeseeable situations, he or she needs a solid grounding in such disciplines as economics, statistics, and accounting. The goal is to provide the student with a coherent body of objective, broadly applicable principles. Such principles are not based on ad hoc conclusions generated by a set of hand-picked cases or a collection of war stories passed down by successful veterans of the business world. They are the product of applied economic logic supported by empirical tests. Armed with scholarly studies subjecting masses of data to rigorous analysis, the student comes away with a reliable guide to how a variety of decisions can be expected to affect stock values. To illustrate the fundamental difference between the two approaches, consider one of my favorite managerial conundrums: what is the best dividend policy? Practitioners of the institutional approach usually impress upon their students the conventional wisdom that, given a fixed level of earnings, investors prefer that corporations distribute more of those earnings as dividends. All things being equal, higher payout ratios supposedly mean higher stock prices. After all, it doesn't take a financial wizard to determine that the market responds favorably to dividend increases and unfavorably to decreases. A business school with a scientific orientation approaches the question quite differently. First, the student reads a classic 1961 paper by Franco Modigliani of MIT and Merton H. Miller of Chicago putting forth the proposition that dividends are irrelevant to how the market values a stock. The student then reads an extensive body of empirical tests supporting that theory, and supporting the proposition that increases and decreases in dividends matter simply because they convey information about management's assessment of future earnings. Where does all this theory and evidence leave the future corporate decision maker? The purpose of the exercise is to foster a propensity to distinguish between financial illusion (in this case, the popular view that investors prefer dividends to capital gains) and market reality. After all this you might say, ''OK, Stern, this is well and good. But we need only one MBA to make your case, and we only deal with dividends in January. Should I hire just one and send him on vacation for the rest of the year?'' My answer is that, especially in finance, the kind of training pioneered at the University of Chicago has implications for a broad range of decisions. A revolution in the theory of corporate finance has been under way since the early 1960s. The study of finance, grounded in sound economic logic and bolstered by sophisticated statistical methods, has made steady progress toward achieving the predictive power of a hard science. Finance scholars are challenging much of the accounting-oriented intuition that continues to pass for the collective wisdom of Wall Street. Properly applied, the new insights can provide managers with a more sensible basis for setting corporate goals, evaluating divisions and subsidiaries, choosing among investment opportunities, pricing acquisitions and divestitures, structuring incentive compensation plans, finding the ideal capital structure, and communicating with the investment community. The modern theory of corporate finance is, at bottom, a change in the theory of valuation. To the extent that managers view their function as providing the maximum returns for stockholders, all financial decisions are grounded in some theory of capital-market pricing. How managers use the assets at their disposal and what they tell investors depend on their understanding of how the stock market works. The rise of modern finance theory has brought about a confrontation between two very different views of how the capital markets value securities. This, in turn, has given rise to two distinct philosophies of management. The traditional view holds that stock prices are determined primarily by reported earnings. Executives who subscribe to this ''accounting'' model of the firm see their goal as maximizing reported earnings per share. The rival view, the ''economic'' model, holds that the market value of any security is determined by the after-tax cash flows it provides. That is, the tricks that accountants can play with things such as inventory valuations don't really matter to the stock market unless they affect some real variable like taxes. According to this view, accounting profits offer a good measure of performance only insofar as they reflect real cash profits. When reported earnings differ significantly from cash flows, they distort performance and provide an unreliable guide to value. RESEARCH IN FINANCE and accounting has produced a large body of evidence attesting to the ability of the stock market to penetrate accounting fictions. The first implication, which business students schooled in the quantitative approach well understand, is that earnings per share don't count; cash flows count. The second implication is that public corporations should be run exactly as if they were private -- to maximize not earnings but cash flows. When a company properly communicates this approach to the market, the sophisticated investors whose assessments have the greatest influence on share prices take good care of the company's stock. The scientific revolution in finance is steadily winning converts in the corporate world. But much corporate practice still betrays the strong influence of accounting considerations and an unwillingness to believe what the market is saying. The prevalence of accounting-based management is the greatest challenge for the modern business school, and its greatest opportunity. The lessons of modern finance offer a great opportunity for managers to improve their service to shareholders. The MBAs who carry these lessons from the premier business schools into the next generation of senior management can be expected to provide great benefits for stockholders.

*  Originally this article was listed with  (FORTUNE Magazine) –written by   By JOEL M. STERN  

Most of the CAT aspirants have already given up hope on IIMs even before starting preparation for CAT.
Why?
Well, this is a result of twin factors. One, most of the students taking CAT, in their 20 years of upbringing have never been exposed to an entrance exam. To add to this, the kind of aura that has been attached to CAT by the media, students and the bunch of coaching institutes mushrooming in the market makes the aspirant vulnerable to succumbing at the slightest confusion caused by the myths making rounds in the market about CAT.

Let’s expose these Myths!

Here comes tips from Vivek Tuteja:

Myth 1: Success ratio in IIMs is 1:120
Here, we will have to separate IIMs from CAT. By my experience I can say that almost two-third of the students taking CAT are not targeting IIMs in the first place. They are targeting host of other institutes affiliated to CAT. They would not have even applied to IIMs if each IIM were charging a separate fee for entrance forms like the other CAT affiliated institutes. So this leaves us with 40,000 students and a ratio of 1:40.
Let’s go a step further. CAT is an exam that requires a lot of perseverance. However roughly only 50 per cent of students are able to persevere through the preparation period and are prepared to their best level on the day of CAT. So if you are taking CAT and seriously targeting IIMs and are ready to sweat it out till the CAT day, your chance of making it to IIMs will be 1:20.
Feeling Better?!!

Myth 2: Maths Genius + Vocab Stud + 800 wpm Reading Speed = IIM Call
Contrary to the popular belief, CAT is not a test to gauge mathematical aptitude and verbal aptitude. CAT is recognized as one of the best tests in the world to check the management aptitude of the candidates. The candidate needs to be good in mathematical and verbal ability but if those were the only areas IIMs were testing, there was no need to design a complicated exam like CAT to test the same.

Myth 3: The exam is getting tougher every year
Well, CAT 98 had 180 questions divided across 4 sections to be solved in 2 hours. So, a candidate was required to clear 4 sectional cut-offs and one overall cut-off in 2 hours. CAT 2004 contained 123 questions divided in three broad sections; hence a candidate was required to clear three sectional cut-offs and an overall cut-off in two hours. So a CAT taker in 2004 roughly had 50 per cent more time per question compared to a CAT aspirant in 1998. Of course, CAT in this period has moved from fundamental based test format to application-based questions.
So CAT has evolved into an application based test which in its course not only checks the basic fundamentals but also how you apply these fundamentals, given the pressure cooker exam environment with multiple simultaneous goals.

Myth 4: Speed and Accuracy match is what you need to crack CAT
An aspirant may have a great accuracy level and high speed, but if he does not possess the right exam strategy and the right selection of questions he will land up in no man’s land.
For a CAT taker one key trait is self-analysis. He needs to analyse his skills at regular interval and accordingly arrive at the right exam strategy. A CAT taker, who carries his ego up his sleeves on the day of CAT, will never be able to crack it. Rather he should use his presence of mind and keep an eye on the war (i.e. individual sections) rather than let his ego fight out each battle (i.e. each question) till the end.

Now, when the big myths have been shattered, let’s analyse why is CAT what it is today?

CAT — a test to check managerial aptitude
CAT checks the exam taker on the essential traits of a manager apart from the quantitative and verbal fundamentals that are prerequisite for anyone joining the MBA programme. These essential traits include adaptability, stress management, analytical approach, decision-making skills, self-analytical skills, and competitive benchmarking. All these skills are required to crack CAT in one way or the other. Apart from these, a manager is supposed to be a team builder, growth-oriented individual and have good ethical values. He should be able to look into a problem from multi-disciplinary angle. These skills are tested in the attitude tests viz. Group Discussion and Personal Interview.
So if you are able to get through the aptitude and attitude tests of CAT, you already have the right management aptitude and are fit for the revered team at IIMs to shape your future

CAT — What it takes?
Let’s understand what it takes to be a potential CAT cracker. Unlike college exams where one can slog it out, burn midnight lamps for 15 –20 days, solve last 5 years’ question papers and can still be sure to get a distinction, CAT preparation requires a single-minded effort, disciplined approach and a lot of perseverance. To be prepared for CAT, one needs to have maths & verbal logic as well as fundamentals in place. Mathematical and Verbal logic are a product of the way one has exposed himself to these logic areas over a period of time and cannot be mastered overnight. So, one should not be shocked if couple of people claim relatively good scores in Mock CATs without much of preparation. It only goes to say that their mathematical/verbal logic is in place. These candidates now need to work on capitalizing their logic upstart by giving due stress on mastering the maths/verbal fundamentals, striking the right exam strategy and getting that split second decision making in place.

Remember, it’s not the most intelligent, most diligent or the most spirited who cracks CAT. Intelligence, diligence and motivation pay only if you are a smart test taker.

So Happy CAT hunting!!

The author is a PGP from IIM Ahmedabad and has 5 years of experience in education consulting. Early this year, Vivek turned entrepreneur and has launched Endeavor Careers in Ahmedabad, an educational enterprise dedicated towards guiding MBA Aspirants in their endeavor to make it to IIMs. he can be contacted at vivek@endeavorcareers.com

WHEN THE LION ROARS , what the Poor CAT can do...! it has to surrender :) nothing more than it could do...:)

well...finally, i'm slowly getting on to the Track...with preparation. Thanks to the my job work...which actually inspiring me to prepare as hard as i can, beacuse i just don't wanna stick to the chair and get glue over the Flat monitor...! daily...for hours i won't.  this single reason will be enough for me to get chargedup for the big see~V~saw battle between  the 'Tiger' and 'CAT'....J

Let's Wait and Watch....!               

Deadly CAT!

Well...I haunted for the Monster...'CAT' rigorously on yesterday. i literally involved in melee with it, but couldn't kill it properly so hence it got away from my hand...L…eventually I missed the fiesta for tonight…L

The surprise, on the face of it, seemed to be a damp squib, as the paper was “on the lines” of CAT2006 – with no deviation in the number of questions, the marking scheme or the pattern. However, the adage – “do not judge a book by its cover” range true and loud. The paper was full of surprises on the inside and left many a student stumped and dazed!

I really had the bitter taste...by seeing my marks in VA section...i.e. scoring mere single digit(9)in RCs...really screwed it up very badly..L but never expected this badly..It was a nice learning though, getting a single digit score in one of section always makes you to come back to the ground.Its a hard fact, still I need to accept it as it is a fact, I cant do anything to change it.

At Positive front: my performance in rest of the Sections was QA(22) & DI(25) ....though may not fetch anything to getinto IIMs but shows my present status of quotient, accuracy i maintained with these sections was really not that bad! particularly considering my preparation level...which i hardly did.  

Anyway my strength is not dried up like a Potsherd...afterall this was a tenuous attempt...with very minimal preparation...J