Cognizant previous year QnA and Interview Experience

Cognizant helps organizations remain ahead of the competition by modernizing technology, reinventing processes, and redefining customer experiences. It is committed to improving the way the world works via technology, whether by changing the corporations on which the world relies or by offering the tools and flexibility necessary to build the best you.

Cognizant recruits both new and seasoned workers for a variety of positions and areas. Cognizant conducts walk-ins and major placement campaigns on several college campuses in their final placements. Cognizant employs experienced workers largely through its career website, HR consulting businesses, and employee referral programs.

At first, there is an academic criterion for the students to apply for the interview.

The criteria are:

• 70% and above in B.tech, Class X and XII
• No active backlogs during the interview

If a student qualifies for these criteria, they can sit for the interview.

The Cognizant interview is mainly divided into three parts namely :

• The Written Round
• The Technical Interview 
• The HR round

The Written Round

First, comes the written exam of the CTS. It is further divided into

three parts namely,

•  The Aptitude Test 
•  The English Comprehension Papers
•  The Coding Questions.

The Aptitude Test:

There comes ten questions in the aptitude section. It focuses on your quantitative and mathematical abilities like time and work, percentages, mensuration, compound interest, time and distance, relative speed, age difficulties, ratio and proportion, and other popular themes that are tested.

Sample Questions:

1)There are forty students in a class out of which there are 14 who are taking Maths and 29 who are taking Computer. What is the probability that a randomly chosen student from this group is taking only the Computer class? 

a)  40%

b) 55% 

c) 65% 

d) 70% 

Answer: 65%

Solution: There are in total of 40 students. 14 are taking Maths and 29 are taking computer. Therefore there have to be 3 students who are taking both the classes. So, 29 – 3 = 26 students are taking only Computer. So probability = 26/40 = 13/20 = 65%

 2)Find the number, the second digit of which is smaller than its first digit by 4, and if 

 the number was divided by the digit’s sum, the quotient would be 7. 

  a) 51

  b) 62 

  c) 73 

  d) None of these 

Answer: d) None of these

Solution: If we consider the number 84, then we get 8 – 4 = 4 and when the sum of digits that is 12 divides the number 84, we get 7.

 3) Aman completes a journey in 10 hours. He travels the first half of the journey at the rate of 21 km/hr and the second half at the rate of 24 km/hr. Find the total journey in km. 

a) 220 km 

b) 234 km 

c) 230 km 

d) 224 km

Answer: d) 224 km

Solution: 

According to the question, 

((1/2)x)/21 + ((1/2)x)/24 = 10 

Solving this equation we get 15x = 168 * 20 

Further x = (168 * 20)/15 = 224 km.

4) A tap can fill a bucket in 6 hours. After half the bucket is filled, three more similar taps are opened. What is the total time taken to fill the bucket completely? 

a) 3 hrs 45 min 

b) 3 hrs 15 min 

c) 4 hrs 15 min 

d) 4 hrs 45 min

Answer: a) 3 hrs 45 min

Solution: 

Time is taken by one tap to fill half the bucket = 3 hours 

So the part filled 4 taps in one hour = 4 * (1/6) = 2/3 of the bucket. 

Therefore, the remaining part is = (1 – 1/2) = 1/2 

Proportionally = 2/3 : 1/2 :: 1 : x 

=> x = 3/4 hours = 45 minutes. So the total time = 3 hrs 45 minutes

5)January 1, 2008, is Tuesday. What day would lie on Jan 1, 2009?

a) Thursday

b) Sunday

c) Tuesday

d) Wednesday

Answer: a) Thursday

Solution:

In such types of questions, one needs to identify the type of year, i.e., whether the year is an average year or a leap year.

So the year 2008 was a leap year. So, it has to have 2 odd days. The year following 2008 is 2009 so the first day of the year would be two days ahead of what it was in 2008. So 1st Jan 2009 would be a Thursday.

6)Identify the odd number from the series: 835, 734, 642, 751, 853, 981, 532

a) 532

b) 853

c) 981

d) 751

Answer: d) 751

Solution:

Looking at the series closely we see that in each number, the difference between the first and last digit of each number is the middle number, except 751.

English Comprehension

In this section, they give you a passage to read and then solve several questions based on the passage.

Passage:

Sixty years ago, on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in New Delhi to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” Large parts of the subcontinent were descending into chaos, as the implications of partitioning the Indian Empire along religious lines became clear to the millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs caught on the wrong side of the border. In the next few months, some twelve million people would be uprooted and as many as a million murdered. But on that night in mid-August the bloodbath—and the fuller consequences of hasty imperial retreat—still lay in the future, and the Mountbattens probably felt they had earned their evening’s entertainment.

Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, had arrived in New Delhi in March 1947, charged with an almost impossible task. Irrevocably enfeebled by the Second World War, the British belatedly realized that they had to leave the subcontinent, which had spiralled out of their control through the nineteen-forties. But plans for brisk disengagement ignored messy realities on the ground. Mountbatten had a clear remit to transfer power to the Indians within fifteen months. Leaving India to God, or anarchy, as Mohandas Gandhi, the foremost Indian leader, exhorted, wasn’t a political option, however tempting. Mountbatten had to work hard to figure out how and to whom power was to be transferred.

The dominant political party, the Congress Party, took inspiration from Gandhi in claiming to be a secular organization, representing all four hundred million Indians. But many Muslim politicians saw it as a party of upper-caste Hindus and demanded a separate homeland for their hundred million co-religionists, who were intermingled with non-Muslim populations across the subcontinent’s villages, towns, and cities. Eventually, as in Palestine, the British saw partition along religious lines as the quickest way to the exit.

But sectarian riots in Punjab and Bengal dimmed hopes for a quick and dignified British withdrawal and boded ill for India’s assumption of power. Not surprisingly, there were some notable absences at the Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi on August 15th. Gandhi, denouncing freedom from the imperial rule as a “wooden loaf, ” had remained in Calcutta, trying, with the force of his moral authority, to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing each other. His great rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had fought bitterly for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, was in Karachi, trying to hold together the precarious nation-state of Pakistan.

Nevertheless, the significance of the occasion was not lost on many. While the Mountbattens were sitting down to their Bob Hope movie, India’s constituent assembly was convening in New Delhi. The moment demanded grandiloquence, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s closest disciple and soon to be India’s first Prime Minister, provided it. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, ” he said. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awaken to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

Posterity has enshrined this speech, as Nehru clearly intended. But today his quaint phrase “tryst with destiny” resonates ominously, so enduring has been the political and psychological scars of partition. The souls of the two new nation-states immediately found utterance in brutal enmity. In Punjab, armed vigilante groups, organized along religious lines and incited by local politicians, murdered countless people, abducting and raping thousands of women. Soon, India and Pakistan were fighting a war—the first of three—over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Gandhi, reduced to despair by the seemingly endless cycle of retaliatory mass murders and displacement, was shot dead in January 1948, by a Hindu extremist who believed that the father of the Indian nation was too soft on Muslims. Jinnah, racked with tuberculosis and overwork, died a few months later, his dream of a secular Pakistan apparently buried with him.

Many of the seeds of postcolonial disorder in South Asia were sown much earlier, in two centuries of direct and indirect British rule, but, a book, after the book has demonstrated, nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable. In “Indian Summer” (Henry Holt; $30), Alex von Tunzelmann pays particular attention to how negotiations were shaped by an interplay of personalities. Von Tunzelmann goes on a bit too much about the Mountbattens’ open marriage and their connections to various British royals, toffs, and fops, but her account, unlike those of some of her fellow British historians, isn’t filtered by nostalgia. She summarizes bluntly the economic record of the British overlords, who, though never as rapacious and destructive as the Belgians in the Congo, damaged agriculture and retarded industrial growth in India through a blind faith in the “invisible hand” that supposedly regulated markets. Von Tunzelmann echoes Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the East India Company when she terms the empire’s corporate forerunner a “beast” whose “the only object was money”; and she reminds readers that, in 1877, the year that Queen Victoria officially became Empress of India, a famine in the south killed five million people even as the Queen’s viceroy remained adamant that famine relief was a misguided policy.

Politically, too, British rule in India was deeply conservative, limiting Indian access to higher education, industry, and the civil service. Writing in the New York Tribune in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx predicted that British colonials would prove to be the “unconscious tool” of a “social revolution” in a subcontinent stagnating under “Oriental despotism.” As it turned out, the British, while restricting an educated middle class, empowered a multitude of petty Oriental despots. (In 1947, there were five hundred and sixty-five of these feudatories, often called maharajas, running states as large as Belgium and as small as Central Park.

Questions:

From the passage, what can we conclude about the view of the author about Lord Mountbatten?

a) Appreciative

b) Sarcastic

c) Neutral

d) Speculative

What is the author likely to agree to as the reason for the chaos in the sub-continent in 1947?

a) Because Gandhi was assassinated

b) Because the British left the sub-continent in haste.

c) Because the Hindus and Muslims could not live in peace.

d) Because Lord Mountbatten was watching a movie on 14th August 1947.

What could possibly “grandiloquence” mean as inferred from the context in which it has been used in the passage?

a) Grand Party

b) Celebrations

c) Lofty speech

d) Destiny

What is the author primarily talking about in the article?

a) Mountbatten’s association with India.

b) Nehru’s speech

c) Gandhi’s assassination

d) The aftermath of the partition.

In the view of the author, What does the Nehru’s phrase “tryst with destiny” symbolise today?

a) A celebration of Indian Independence

b) An inspirational quote

c) A reminder of Gandhi’s assassination

d) A symbol of the ills of the partition

The author persists on talking about the ” Bob Hope movie” in the article. Why?

a) Because the movie was a classic of 1947

b) He thinks it caused the partition of the sub-continent.

c) He uses it to show the apathy of the Britishers towards the sub-continent

d) It was Mountbatten’s favourite movie.

What does the author imply about the future of Pakistan?

a) It becomes a secular country.

b) It becomes unsecular.

c) It is unprosperous.

d) It becomes a rogue state.

Why was Gandhi assassinated?

a) Because he was favouring the Muslims.

b) His assassin thought he was partial to the Muslims.

c) He got killed in the violence after partition.

d) None of these

Answers:

b) Sarcastic

b) Because the British left the sub-continent in haste.

c) Lofty speech

d) The aftermath of the partition.

d) A symbol of the ills of the partition

c) He uses it to show the apathy of the Britishers towards the sub-continent

b) It becomes unsecular.

b) His assassin thought he was partial to the Muslims.

Coding Questions

The coding problems follow the aptitude and comprehension sections. They give you easy to moderate level questions that you must answer in a certain period of time.

Sample Questions

1) Given a number, the task is to check if this number is Armstrong or not using Command Line Arguments. A positive integer of n digits is called an Armstrong number of order n (order is the number of digits) if.

Example:

Input: 153

Output: Yes

153 is an Armstrong number.

1*1*1 + 5*5*5 + 3*3*3 = 153

Input: 120

Output: No

120 is not an Armstrong number.

1*1*1 + 2*2*2 + 0*0*0 = 9

Solution:

class Pephub {
  
    // Function to calculate x
    // raised to the power y
    public static int power(int x, long y)
    {
        if (y == 0)
            return 1;
        if (y % 2 == 0)
            return power(x, y / 2) * power(x, y / 2);
        return x * power(x, y / 2) * power(x, y / 2);
    }
  
    // Function to calculate order of the number
    public static int order(int x)
    {
        int n = 0;
        while (x != 0) {
            n++;
            x = x / 10;
        }
        return n;
    }
  
    // Function to check whether the given number is
    // Armstrong number or not
    public static int isArmstrong(int x)
    {
        // Calling order function
        int n = order(x);
        int temp = x, sum = 0;
        while (temp != 0) {
            int r = temp % 10;
            sum = sum + power(r, n);
            temp = temp / 10;
        }
  
        // If satisfies Armstrong condition
        if (sum == x)
            return 1;
        else
            return 0;
    }
  
    // Driver code
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
  
        // Check if length of args array is
        // greater than 0
        if (args.length > 0) {
  
            // Get the command line argument and
            // Convert it from string type to integer type
            int num = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
  
            // Get the command line argument
            // and check if it is Armstrong
            int res = isArmstrong(num);
  
            // Check if res is 0 or 1
            if (res == 0)
                // Print No
                System.out.println("No\n");
            else
                // Print Yes
                System.out.println("Yes\n");
        }
        else
            System.out.println("No command line "
                               + "arguments found.");
    }
}

2)

Given a number N, the task is to check if N is a Prime Number or not using Command Line Arguments.

Examples: 

Input: N = 7

Output: Yes

Input: N = 15

Output: No

Solution:

class Pephub {
 
    // Function to check if x is prime
    public static int isPrime(int x)
    {
        int i;
 
        // Loop to check if x has any factor
        // other than 1 and x itself
        for (i = 2; i < x / 2 + 1; i++) {
            if (x % i == 0) {
                // Since i is a factor of x
                // x is not prime
                return 0;
            }
        }
 
        // x is prime
        return 1;
    }
 
    // Driver code
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
 
        // Check if length of args array is
        // greater than 0
        if (args.length > 0) {
 
            // Get the command line argument and
            // Convert it from string type to integer type
            int n = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
 
            // Check if n is prime
            if (isPrime(n) == 1)
                System.out.println("Yes");
            else
                System.out.println("No");
        }
        else
            System.out.println("No command line "
                               + "arguments found.");
    }
class GFG {
 
    // Function to check if x is prime
    public static int isPrime(int x)
    {
        int i;
 
        // Loop to check if x has any factor
        // other than 1 and x itself
        for (i = 2; i < x / 2 + 1; i++) {
            if (x % i == 0) {
                // Since i is a factor of x
                // x is not prime
                return 0;
            }
        }
 
        // x is prime
        return 1;
    }
 
    // Driver code
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
 
        // Check if length of args array is
        // greater than 0
        if (args.length > 0) {
 
            // Get the command line argument and
            // Convert it from string type to integer type
            int n = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
 
            // Check if n is prime
            if (isPrime(n) == 1)
                System.out.println("Yes");
            else
                System.out.println("No");
        }
        else
            System.out.println("No command line "
                               + "arguments found.");
    }
}

3)Given a string, the task is to check if this String is Palindrome or not using Command Line Arguments.

Examples: 

Input: str = "Geeks"

Output: No

Input: str = "wow"

Output: Yes

Solution:

class Pephub {
  
    // Function to reverse a string
    public static int isPalindrome(String str)
    {
        int n = str.length();
  
        // Check if the characters from one end
        // match with the characters
        // from the other end
        for (int i = 0; i < n / 2; i++)
            if (str.charAt(i) != str.charAt(n - i - 1))
  
                // Since characters do not match
                // return 0 which resembles false
                return 0;
  
        // Since all characters match
        // return 1 which resembles true
        return 1;
    }
  
    // Driver code
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
  
        // Check if length of args array is
        // greater than 0
        if (args.length > 0) {
  
            // Get the command line argument
            // and check if it is Palindrome
            int res = isPalindrome(args[0]);
  
            // Check if res is 0 or 1
            if (res == 0)
                // Print No
                System.out.println("No\n");
            else
                // Print Yes
                System.out.println("Yes\n");
        }
        else
            System.out.println("No command line "
                               + "arguments found.");
    }
}

Technical Interview

After the written exam, which is mainly conducted online on several platforms, a set of students are selected for the Technical Interview which takes place On-campus.

Various questions from programming languages, DSA, and the active projects that the 

Students been working on or has worked with are asked. 

Here are some interview experiences from people who have qualified for the CTS interview

I was asked the following questions :

Questions on my internship project which was related to K-means clustering such as its code, drawbacks, solutions to avoid drawbacks, Image size-related questions, what is Pixel size, what is unsupervised classification, examples of methods of unsupervised classification, etc.

He asked questions based on my project topic, Sentiment analysis, he asked me how you have implemented your project topic, what all features were used, how features were implemented, training set size, test set significance, how dictionary for uni-grams and bi-grams is implemented, what is smoothing, Explain Naive Bayes, etc.

Then he moved to the puzzle problem and he asked about a very famous puzzle that is, how a biased coin can be made into an unbiased one.

Then he started asking questions on Data structure and algorithm and asked very well-known problems like 

Reverse the Link list

Find the sum of boundary nodes of the binary tree

Print the link list in reverse.

In this way, the second round got completed. No filtering was done in this round.

If we have good domain knowledge and concepts like Java OOPS, Database Tables and SQL Queries, OS deadlock and Critical Section, Paging, Data structures, and Complexity of a code, we can easily crack this interview.

The level of questions was easy.

A total of 15 out of 20 students were shortlisted for HR round.

Technical Round 1:

The interviewer asked lots of questions from different domains. For me he asked me two solve two codes, codes were easy. One was to count the frequency of characters in a given string, other was to check whether the given IP address is valid or not. Then he switched to Web Services, then asked about DBMS, then some web development-related questions, and asked about software development lifecycle. This interview went for approx. 1 hour.

Technical HR 2

This was easy, based on interview 1, whatever your strong domain, they will ask questions from your strong domain only. This interview went for 20min.

HR round

At the end of the interview comes the final or last round, the HR round of the interview.

Mainly most of the students are shortlisted till the end of the Technical Interviews, and the HR round is considered a formality but still, it's important and the HRs notice a lot about the interviewees and mark them on it. 

Here are some Interview experiences from interviewees who have qualified this final round of the CTS Interview.

After I had a great Technical Interview, I was shortlisted for the HR interview which took place shortly after. The HR was very friendly with me and asked everything very frankly. Try to tell him everything frankly, and do not lie. This will create a good impression of you and will help in bagging the job.

5 out of 27 made till final HR.

The HR Round was very basic. The HR asked me very general Questions like where do you see yourself after 5 years, why do you want to join CTS etc.

I had a great written exam as well as an awesome technical Interview. So around 6 out of 50 students were shortlisted for the HR round. The HR was very nice to me and he asked questions like: 

Why Cognizant?

How was your day & why?

Why cognizant should hire you?