Strategy For attempting mock-CATs and CAT .

Disclaimer : Every-one has different strengths and weaknesses, so the strategy and approach of one may not work that well for some-one else.
The author has tried to do post the strategies in the most generic way and they are based upon the common methodologies adopted by him, his friends who are scoring consistently in the higher 99s and those who have belled the CAT in previous years and are in the IIMs, FMS, XLRI.


Assumption : i.) As explained in the previous posts, there are some topics which are repeatedly found as the major areas tested in CAT, so the reader must have gained some proficiency in them till now.
ii.) CAT is a paper of 2:15 hours, is online and provides facility to bookmark a question / skip the question / come back to previous question.
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QA : Start from the very first question, if it is from a topic you r good at, read it, see if you can solve it under 3 minutes, if yes solve it, if no bookmark it. If it is from a topic you aren't good at, read it, if it looks too easy solve it, see if you can do some value putting etc, if you can't leave it.

Once you have seen all the questions and hopefully solved some of them, you can be sure that you haven't missed any sitter from the sections you are comfortable.

Depending on the time left with you, you can either solve the bookmarked questions right away or go to the next section and come back if you have time left.

DI : ever leave a set untouched. // work on a set for 3-4 minutes and see if u r heading some-where, if u feel u can crack it under 10 minutes, do it. If u feel u can crack it but it will take time, bookmark it, if u feel it can't be done in exam conditions forget about it.

If u have wasted 6-7 minutes on a question aren't able to get a definite direction but have a feel that u will be able to crack it . DONT BELIEVE ON UR FEEL book-mark it and leave it, u can always come back if time permits.

Always look for the individual questions like Data Sufficiency etc. which are usually (but not always) easier.

Even if u aren't able to crack a set, have a look at the questions, at times there are some questions in a set which are pretty doable and some which are time-taking, this isn't that significant in Aimcats but in actual CAT papers, u will almost always have some of these kind of sets.

VA : Okie, I am not really good in VA, so I won't say much , though I would like to make two suggestion to those who have good reading speed but aren't too sure of VA.
Trust on RC, reading comprehension are high-investment high return questions, though u need more time to do them w.r.t. VA questions, but u have higher accuracy in them.

Don't do RC questions with-out first reading the passage, I know that a lot of coaching institutes say that one should read the questions first before reading the passage, but I would suggest to at-least try reading passages first and then attempting the questions and see which one has higher accuracy.