Role of Question Selection in CAT ...

Note : This post is the same as the reply given by by me at pg, except the last para which concentrate on the role of question selection in Computer based test.


Question Selection always plays a big part in competitions like CAT, and though it largely depends upon a no. of factors like the paper format, relative difficulty of questions and all, but the most important factor is YOU.

You have to realize that what are the questions that you are comfortable with, what are the questions that you can solve in less time, for some guys like RCs are the only thing they are confident about in VA, for some-other guys RCs may be dreading while Vocab a nemesis.

But then you have to understand, that at times you have to make a trade-off and leave something you are good at just in order to make sure actually get the thing that matters most, a decent(and balanced) percentile.

Now though it depends on person to person, but still I would give u some points which might help you, please understand that these are my personal opinions and hence try them in mocks to see whether they are actually suitable for you.

i.) Don't make any pre-assumption about the paper like I will solve 15 questions in quant, rather chill out n try to find questions which look familiar to you, in the sense that either you have solved/seen such question earlier or the concept involved looks easier.

ii.) If there is any question involving terms such as 'n' or 'x' give yourself 2 minutes to try to put various values of the variable and option check.

iii.) Don't give a LR puzzle more than 5 minutes unless you actually get an idea on where it is leading to, or you have no better question to solve (LR puzzles are kind of addictive particularly for engineers and guys who love puzzles, but then its a exam).

iv.) Make use of bookmark : if u realize that a question looks familiar but you aren't able to crack in a few minutes bookmark it and solve other questions, come back to it once you feel like you have solved all the easier questions.

v.) If you aren't a voracious reader chose passage in which the questions are of factual nature eg: which of the following is the reason cited by the author, or which of the following is the reason provided .....
These kind of questions can be solved by just skimming through the passage, and then looking for the keyword(of the question) in the passage.
Avoid philosophical RCs and questions like, what does author think OR what does author implies.

And now, lets see how question selection differs from a paper based CAT to a cbt CAT.

You must have seen people telling that you should do the questions in two go, one of x min and the other y min, In a cbt exam this could be pretty much time-taking, its not easy to bookmark 10 questions and then you keep searching the questions which you have bookmarked, plus if you guys have appeared in online mock-cats, it takes some time for the questions to load, so in my opinion the strategy needs to be changed a little bit.

Go for all the questions that you think, can be solved in under 2 minutes, bookmark questions only if you know they are easy but you are missing some key point OR if the question is easy but involves lot of calculations avoid using excessive bookmarking. Go to the other sections, do them and then try to analyze your sectional performance and accordingly decide to go again into which section, go and solve the bookmarked questions in the section.

Best of luck !!!