Preperation Strategy : 60 days to CAT .

This post isn’t intended to be for every-one, this has an intended set of users.

i.) Those who think, they haven’t been able to do full justice to their intellectual and would like to do so.
ii.) Those who aren’t too bothered about the TIME/CL/IMS cut-offs rather who are willing to get into an IIM and preferably an A/B/C.
iii.) Those who are adaptable and flexible, what this effectively means is, those who are willing to learn and to change themselves in order to achieve the greater good.


Let’s look into how to prepare for CAT with 60 days to go.
Considering that there are a few days when you don’t feel like studying, or you don’t get time for that, e.g. you have your end-sem exams, its date for a project submission, you have to do an assignment or any other such reason I am assuming that you have just 60 days to ace for the D-day (or days).

Quant:

This is the one section where the only thing that is more important than hard work is smart work. This is the section where learning actually helps, try to revise the concepts of all the topics covered in CAT, as you read a topic try to solve some questions on that (remember its not the quantity but the quality of questions that you solve) Never ever waste your precious time on questions which take more than 4 minutes, remember CAT isn’t a Math’s Olympiad it is CAT.
When this is done, take as many CAT/MOCK-CAT papers you can find and see if there are questions related to that topic, and solve them. Once the questions are solved, take them again and think of yourself in a situation where you haven’t read the topic then try to solve the question by using option rejection, option checking, or value putting.

Data Interpretation:

There are a lot of teachers and institutes which give a lot of emphasis on learning squares, cubes, percentage tables and what not. I am not saying that they aren’t helpful but perhaps they aren’t that important as they are emphasized, in my little experience I’ve realized that one doesn’t save more than a few minutes by using these tricks, and no doubt these few minutes are important in a paper like CAT but is it worth the effort that you put into, and whether you feel confident while using them. If you keep re-checking all calculations which you have done by using these tricks there is no use of learning them in the first place.
DI is one section where two things are really important, first good question selection and second a cool head. And these things come from practice. But then its very unlike Quant, here you don’t have a well defined course / topics. So what is important is to do quality work on DI. Take a set of DI everyday, or if you are lazy enough to not being able to do that take at-least one DI set every few days, the important thing here is : first try to solve the set in a fixed time frame, say that of 10 minutes, if you can solve it in less than that, then be happy and go to sleep, else try to solve it in 30 minutes, if you can’t solve it even in 30 minutes then there are two possibilities, either the set wasn’t worth attempting or there is something which is missing in your reasoning. Just do remember one thing, if you can’t solve a set at a particular time this doesn’t mean you can’t solve it. At times what you need in DI (particularly LR) is a click, so don’t get dis-heartened remember its just practice match the final is on the D-day.
Coming back to point if you can’t solve it, discuss with some-one who you know is good to solve this kind of questions, he/she may be your friend or a teacher else you can ask the question at forums like pg (www.pagalguy.com) for those of you who don’t know what pg is, or else you can ask the question at this blog itself.
This is important because this way you would improve your question selection ability, in case you get a set which is similar to one you have solved you will feel confident and it would be easier to solve it.

Verbal Ability:

I know that I am not a very good person to say how to prepare for Verbal ability, but I can give you some tips on how to score good in it.
Use option elimination; at times it is easier to find out which options can’t be the answer than finding out, which option is the answer.
In reading comprehension, avoid inferential RCs which have questions like, what does the author means, or what is the intention of the author unless you have read the topic well and have gained good insight into it.
In para-jumbles, don’t try to find the complete order, rather try to find two sentences which need to be in certain order, and then use it to reject options.