Thousands of people attend tution classes for CAT every year, hoping that they would be able to crack the exam. They also pay thousands of rupees in tution fees, books and MOCK CATs. If you take the money spent on CAT coaching every year, you probably would be able to set up a new IIM every year!!
Anyway since I have "cracked" or "belled" the CAT I would like to share some of the tips for free.
There are basically three steps to successfully crack CAT
- Accuracy: You have to be extremely accurate while answering CAT as CAT has both negative marks and limited time to answer the questions, getting a question wrong would imply that not only did you lose out on marks you have already got, you are also wasting time which could have potentially been used for answering an other question. In other words "opportunity cost" of a wrong answer in CAT is very high.
- Selection: Selection is another very important area when answering CAT. You have to attempt(and get right) all the easy and moderate questions and leave out all the hard questions. The definitions of easy and moderate are quite subjective and it depends on an individual. In a general sense any question which can be solved within 4 minutes by an average person can be considered to be easy. Easy questions are questions in your comfort area.
- Strategy: Strategy is another important area and it is the most misunderstood area. Firstly, people do not understand what strategy is all about and they devise elaborate plans which fall flat under examination pressure. Secondly, the strategy they devise will be inappropriate or flawed. There is no general strategy applicable to everyone. You have to devise a strategy of your own. But there are a few important points that would aid in developing an effective strategy.
- The strategy should be simple: A simple strategy is one which can be easily applied in an examination scenario and which is robust to changes in paper pattern. Some people have elaborate plans like attempt DI for first 15 mins, then move to Quant, come back to DI, go to verbal, come back to Quant etc etc. If there is a major change in difficulty level or change in paper pattern, there is a good chance that the whole strategy will fail
- The strategy should reflect your strengths and weaknesses: You should thoroughly know your strengths and weaknesses before you attempt the real CAT. Although it sounds like a management cliche, all it means that you should have a good idea as to what areas you are strong in and what areas you are weak in. You have to score heavily in your strong areas and you have to minimize losses in your weak areas. If you are strong in Geometry and weak in number theory, you should ideally attempt all the questions in Geometry and attempt the easy questions in number theory.
- The strategy should reflect your priorities: Different IIMs have different cutoffs and the admission procedures keep changing all the time. The best approach would be to cross cutoff(96 %ile) in all the sections and then maximize the overall score. However some people may be really weak in one section. Those people should try to maximize their overall score without bothering too much about cutoffs. They have to try to get a minimum threshold like (85%ile) in their weak section but should maximize their overall score. By using this strategy they can atleast get a few IIM calls and get calls from other good institutes rather than getting no calls at all.
That is it for now. If I have the time or the inclination, I shall post more
