Introduction post : ThE final 30 days.

A lot of people have been asking me to write something about " What to do in the last few days " and I've been telling them that I will be writing such a post soon, so finally today is the day, when I will be writing that post, but I thought lets make a few things clear before you read that post.

Please understand, that you are the best judge of your-self, its you who has to decide what do you want in life, to decide your priorities and to check if something is working for you.

What-ever the post contains are my personal views on how to make the best of the final 30 days, its not to be considered as the rule-book but as a guide book which might help you in getting your dreams come true but how to use this guide book in the best possible manner is all your call.


A few assumptions that I am making for a reader(so that he can get benefits from it)

1.) You are actually willing to bell the CAT and it ain't just a time-pass or an option for you(Though u might be showing this to others.")

2.) You can spend 100 hours in these 30 days. and preferably these are spread evenly.

3.) You are flexible and willing to change and to learn.


And finally a word of precaution ....

I am just another CAT aspirant, I haven't been there and done that, never appeared in CAT before and I do have a lot of short-comings, I do commit a lot of mistakes in the mocks, I am just a mediocre and lazy guy who is not particularly great in either of QA/DI/VA.

So if you are reading this post, be warned that what-ever I am going to tell you may not be the best for you.

p.s -> The actual post will follow in a little time.

Mistakes I won't Repeat

In this post, I am making a list of the mistakes which I have committed in previous mocks (and I am sure some of you must have made these or other) So lets make sure that none of us repeat any of these mistakes in future.

1.) Going on a speed spree, while accuracy goes for a toss. Its good to have great speed but not on the cost of accuracy, we have to have a proper balance among the two.

2.) Not marking a question even after solving it. We have to have confidence in ourselves. At times we don't mark a question even after solving it, since we think that the answer can't be so simple.

3.) Watching watch too many times, and taking un-necessary pressure about the time remaining, its good to have an eye on the watch, but don't get obsessed by it. Its okey if u gave a few extra minutes to a question or a section.

4.) Investing (actually wasting) too much time in a particular question (particularly DI set). We have to make sure that its not a matter of proud to solve a set while making the score bad. At times one feels that since I have already wasted some minutes on a particular question, so let me take a few more minutes and solve the question, we have to learn when to say no to a question and carry on with other questions.

5.) Wasting too much time on a particular section thinking its too easy / too difficult and spending a few more minutes will ensure clearing cut-off / getting good score. Remember if it is actually so, you can always come back to it after completing other sections don't ruin the entire paper in hope of doing good in one.

6.) Solving questions on feel, (particularly in QA/DI) don't mark an option just because it looks good and more so if its actually a +3 / -1. Though its a good method if you are able to reject a few options, and even then use it only when you are sure of clearing cut-offs in that particular section.

7.) Don't get complacent, at times after solving a few questions in a section, we feel its enough and I would be able to score good in this section so lets leave it and move on, just do remember if it seems easy to you, chances are that it will be easy for others also and there is a slight chance that you haven't actually that good as you think it is.

8.) And last but most important, a lot of guys feel always at extremes, a lot of guys to whom I have talked, say things like I am extremely good in one/two section while I am extremely bad in some other, so they don't work for improving their so called extremely good section, but please realize that there are a lot of smart guys over there and no-one (I repeat no-one is perfect) so you can always get better even in the section you feel god-like.

More-ever CAT always has a few sitters in every section, so with a bit of common-sense you can always clear the cut-off in ur weakest section, remember CAT prefers smart work over hard work, don't over-do yourself not in your weakest section not in any other, analyzing your-self and do that with-out taking any extra pressure of doing good in a particular section.


I hope we won't be repeating any of these and other similar mistakes......

Cheers .....

Those 135 mintues ....

THIS POST IS REPLICA OF MY POST IN THE PG THREAD "The most important 135 minutes), I am posting it here for those of you who are not on pg (though its a great place to be for all CAT aspirants), in hope that it might help you in some way




I am not a winner, I am not a loser, though there is one-thing sure

I AM A SURVIVOR ......


CAT isn't just an exam for me (I am sure it won't be just that for any of you) its a way to prove myself, its the pay-back time to all people who have believed in me, even when I failed, and I failed miserably (more about this in the "coveted" post.

I have too many bad habits, and honestly speaking I love having some of them. One of these is the strong urge to "prove my-self right, come what may".
In CAT perspective, people have been telling me to do this and to do that, because it is what his brother/sister/friend has done and he is in some premier college. There were suggestions ranging from to mug-up the word-lists, to learn squares, cubes of natural numbers and what not, to not bother much about speed but work on accuracy, to read norman lewis, wren n martin, barren, to solve arun sharma and I don't know how many other books. To solve tougher questions(which either take more than 5 minutes time to solve, or which need some particular methodology without which they are un-solvable) because they will make me ready to face comparatively easier questions in CAT, to solve the paper with this strategy and that and what not.

But with these bad habits, I have a good habit, I do know about my-self, my strengths and weaknesses and I do know what I want from life and what I can do for it. I knew that I can't do a lot of things, unless I can't convince myself that I will do myself some good by remembering Barren's 3000 (or so ..) words, I am not gonna do that.

I always believed in one thing, if I can keep myself interested in CAT till the D-Day I can make it. So kept things simple, kept things in control so that they seem fun, when I appeared in my first AIMCAT(actually aimtest), the only thing in my mind was to have fun (and may be to prove that THIS IS THE RIGHT APPROACH), I thought nothing about strategy, I thought nothing about cut-offs, just a simple n basic guideline was there " GO THERE AND DO YOUR BEST IN ALL THE SECTIONS". I scored 99.23 percentile with VA at 80.92 percentile and rest 2 at 99.xx .

From that time to this, nothing much has changed, I am planning to follow the same simple strategy in CAT ' 09." GO THERE AND DO YOUR BEST IN ALL THE SECTIONS".

At times, I am compelled to show others how important a particular strategy is in cracking CAT, or that a particular book will do wonders for your preparation but honestly speaking the most important thing that can help you is "KEEP THINGS SIMPLE AND LOVE THE JOB YOU DO".

At 22'nd jan, I may feel shattered, and every-one reading this post after that date may feel, that's why he is not there.
But those 135 minutes are mine, I am gonna do what I love and what I have believed in those 135 minutes.
That way, I might turn out into a failure by not being there, but I will survive coz I still loved my job, I loved my preparations (this is what people call it), I loved my mock-cats and my discussions with puys, with my KDT and PGDT team-mates and with my hostel friends.

Success or Failure,
for one thing I am sure...
No matter what comes out,
I am gonna survive.

~~~~ Live ur life, not to be a hero BUT to live your life and mind you, living your life ain't same as just being alive ~~~~

AIMCAT : 1007 : Analysis and how to maximize the score .

My perception before the AIMCAT : As CAT is close, TIME would refrain from doing too much experimentation or giving a paper of high difficulty, but as this paper is a pencil paper test so number of questions might increase a bit.

Overview: Paper was almost on the lines of expected, except for equal no. of questions in all the three sections.

Aimcat Analysis : The test consisted of 72 questions, with 24 questions in each of three sections QA,VA and DI. Total time available for the paper was 135 minutes, with no sectional time limits.

QA : The section can be marked as an easy to moderate section. It had a lot of sitters along with quite a few time taking questions. There were quite a few questions which could have been solved by proper observation and option rejection, with-out knowing about the concepts involved.
The paper was pretty easier in comparison to previous Aimcats and CAT 08, so the cut-off score is bound to be on the higher side. But to score very high marks in the section wasn't easy considering a few tricky and speed-breaking questions scattered here and there in the paper.

Expected cut-off : 28 for 85 percentile.
40 for 95 percentile.

DI : DI is often considered to be the most dreading section of Aimcats, and going by the recent Aimcats it usually has the lowest cut-offs, this time the condition is a bit different. DI was the easiest section of the paper (individual perceptions may vary) with as 15 out of 24 questions (4 out of 6 sets) were based on interpreting simple figures.
Remaining two sets were decent and required some thinking but one out of them was very similar to set already been asked in previous aimcats and hence can be considered as considerably easy.

Expected cut-off : 30 for 85 percentile.
40 for 95 percentile.

VA : VA was comparatively the most difficult section of this Aimcat, a lot of inferential questions in the RCs with quite a few arguable answers as provided in the answer booklet made life difficult for people who depend a lot on RCs. 5 vocab based questions were also very difficult, and I wonder whether more than 20 percent people would have got 2 or more correct.
In contrast, the other VA questions were pretty easy because the easy option rejection.

Expected cut-off : 20 for 85 percentile.
28 for 95 percentile.

OA :Though this paper was not even close to the standard of actual CAT papers, it was pretty good for the lessons it provided.

Expected cut-off : 80 for 85 percentile
100 for 95 percentile
115 for 99 percentile.
Lessons one needs to learn.

A lot of guys would have done better if they had idea about the difficulty level of the paper. Last few questions in QA and the last two sets in DI were among the easiest questions of the paper, while a lot of guys would have wasted quite a lot of time in doing the more time-taking (time taking isn't same as being difficult) questions and hence lost a chance to maximize their overall score. Therefore it is very important to ensure that no question remains unattended (read unread).

A lot of people, mostly engineers depend too much on RC for scoring in VA section, the paper was a kind of wake up call for them (including me:P). Quite a few answers are debatable, this should be used as an excuse.

Going into a paper with too many predetermined constraints like solving x number of questions isn't always a good idea, rather one should try to maximize his score by solving as many questions as he can in the allotted time.

Will be posting some questions which could have been solved even without knowing the underlying concepts + some questions which could have been done in less time than it usually takes while solving the questions using formal approach.

P.S. -> The lessons mentioned in this post apply on me as much (read much more) than they do on anybody else. I am scoring a total of 117 (courtesy to 14 wrong questions in such a simple paper).

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.
_____________________________________________________________________

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.

My take on CAT '09

Yes I know that it has been pretty late since I last posted on this blog, and that its just a few weeks away from the D-day (or the D-week or what-ever) but still I thought its never late for a good thing, so lets try to have a look at what can we expect from the online format of the CAT.

A few things which I want to clearly state before going into the main body of the post, all the things which I am going to write are just my views and predictions, and they may or may not be true, I am not going to write things like the number of questions one can expect in CAT but the type of questions which have more probability of appearing in CAT.

QA :

CBT or PBT (paper based test) , this section should be consisting of similar questions, testing the same set of skills and so it shall need similar approach as theconventional CAT exams (as if there is something like conventional CAT :O).

The point to emphasize here is, even though the total number of questions may decrease (most probably it will) and almost all the coaching institutes are emphasizing that one has to be good in all topics in order to do good in the exam, it isn’t so.

According to observation of previous year CATs one thing is for sure, 40 % marks in any section is sure to get you 98+ percentile, this effectively means you need to do 8 out of 20 (or so) questions right. So why do coaching institutes emphasize on studying all topics, because you never know questions from which section would be easier, the paper may have easier questions from the section you have left while difficult ones from your areas of comfort, now here is a trade-off : you either work on all the topics, so that you can do the sitters from all the areas well or you may decide to be so good in your favorite topics that you can solve the questions, come what may.


DI/LR:

DI is the one section which will probably get affected most.

Reasons:
i.) Fewer number of questions means either there will be fewer sets or fewer questions per set, while the former will make question selection tougher and more important, the later will make sets less worthy and hence you will need to do more sets in the same amount of time for having our desired percentile.
ii.) Aspirants used to fill the tables and other figures with data while attempting DI/LR questions, this facility won’t be available now + It isn’t easy to look at the screen each time you need a data.

No matter how hard this problem seems but it can be solved by one remedy “PRACITCE”.

VA/RC :

More probably then not this time CAT will be emphasizing less on RC questions then on other questions, questions on usage/jumbled up sentences/sentence correction are likely to form major section of the paper, short passages with lesser number of questions than usual may be a surprise package for many.

Suggestions to improve in this section: emphasize less on reading speed and more on comprehension/analysis of the read text, don’t depend too much on techniques like reading the question first and then trying to find out the key-word in the passage but try to actually understand the passage and then answer the questions, if possible work on vocabulary, it might be of help, get acquainted with grammar rules etc.

Some more points to note.

==> Data sufficiency questions may be back in fashion, both in QA and in DI.
==> Less emphasis on lengthy table based DIs, more on crisp logical reasoning questions and a few pie-chart or other figure based DIs, which have many small and related figures per set.
==> Analytical reasoning questions will be in something to look for.
==>Be comfortable and confident, why ??? let me take an example of QA.

There would be somewhere around 20 questions of QA that you will have to do in 45 minutes.
Now lets say you need 4 minutes to look at your watch, adjust the mouse, scratch your neck and other such inevitable things.
Now lets take the following assumptions.
i.) you read all the questions.
ii.) you solve 10 questions, out of which you solve 8 correctly rest 2 you either solve in-correctly or you leave them in-between coz they seem to be lengthy.
iii.) You have an average reading speed, and you take close to 80 seconds to read a question and realize whether you should try it.

Now usually there would be at-least 2-3 questions, which would be from the topics you dread, so these questions you will leave even without wasting reading them and wasting much time, lets say taking 30 minutes per question. So you would have seen 3 questions in 90seconds (Wow, that’s quick !!!) + you will take close to 560 seconds in reading the questions you won’t attempt.

So in total you have more than 30 minutes to attempt the10 questions, out of which 4-5 will be sitters which can be easily solved in about 90 seconds each. Attempting 4such questions would mean you have 24 minutes for rest 6 questions that means whopping 4 minutes per question, and these are the easier questions from the topics you are comfortable in.

Now doesn’t it seem obvious that more than 98 percent of people should get a sectional of 98 percentile plus in QA :P

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 !!!