the tyranny of CAT

Obviously I failed to learn the lesson from my GRE 5 years ago.

I went into the GMAT psched to ace the math section. After all, I can never seem to score on the verbal, so my best hope was to get full marks on math. This seemed reasonable, since my mistakes on the practise tests were all from careless mistakes, and always because I was too lazy to make sure my solutions were watertight. (If you are wondering what this statement means, you can try a sample GMAT exam youself. Just a free 26MB download from mba.com.) This is in sharp contrast to the verbal section, where I often have strong opinions different from the marking scheme. Obviously this means I don't do well, but I'm sure my English is better than the people who set the questions.

The tyranny of the Computer Adaptive Test (CAT) is that every question given is based on your performance in previous questions. If you get them right, you get harder questions. This supposedly allows the system to use a lesser number of questions to differentiate the ability of applicants. It also means you can never go back to a previous question and change the answer. So the typical 'O' and 'A' level strategy of breezing through once though and then going back to check the ones you are unsure of no longer applies ... you have to be damn sure before you click next. So to cut a long story short, I never did finish the math section, despite rushing through the last few questions on gut feel. Needless to say, I didn't do so hot.

The irony was that after that I breezed through the verbal and even ended in barely over half the allotted time. I had this bad feeling that I must be getting the questions wrong because they seemed to be getting easier and easier, but in the end I did so well that I still came up in the 99th percentile overall - i.e. my verbal even managed to pull up my math! That was totally not what I was expecting at all. So it was a happy story at the end of the day, now just pending the results from my essays which I have pretty high confidence in.

This is very similar to the mess I landed in for the GRE when I didn't manage to finish the logic section. Again, I was aiming for full marks and similarly, I took too long to ponder the earlier questions. So anyone else going for a CAT, you have been warned ...

In other news, I finally surfed into an ex-classmates blog, ever since he told me about it during a visit in Dec (yes I have been offline very long). If anyone wants to hear a foreigner's perspective on working in China, you can read this Microsoft employee's blog from Shenzhen. I find it very uplifting because it gives me some hope that Singapore will not lose all our business to China in the near term because their middle management is all incompetant. (Maybe this article explains why.)