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With around 4 months remaining for CAT 2017, we hope everyone has started appearing for CAT’17 Mock Tests already. In case you haven’t, fasten your seatbelts and join T.I.M.E., CL or IMS for CAT- level mocks. Mock tests give you a clear picture of the type of questions and difficulty level of the exam. Regularly appearing for mocks helps increase the SPEED AND ACCURACY. While a lot of people appear for mocks, they don’t analyse the results.
Appearing for these tests is only fruitful if you analyse your score and thereby work on improving it.
When you have selected which mocks to take, take its complete set because every Institute designs its mock test series to cover the whole set of the problems that can be asked. If you have enough time, club it with mocks of other institutes to have more variety and see where you stand in the competition. You can start
by taking 1-2 mocks every week as of now.
Step 2: Build A Strategy – (During Mock)
Building the best strategy for oneself is a continuous process till you give a sufficient number of mocks and find what works best for you. As of now, start giving mocks with a fresh mind, don’t exhaust yourself before the test, this would
help you realise your full potential.
Round 1: Go through all the questions and solve the easiest questions (sitters) there itself, the ones for which you know the solution. Mark for review the questions that you know how to solve, but might take some time or you have an idea about the concept behind it.
Round 2: Attempt the Marked for review questions
Round 3: (If at all you get to this part) Attempt the unmarked questions
Step 3: Analyse Your Score –
The most important step is to analyse your score. Merely appearing for the mocks will not improve your performance until you don’t analyse your strengths and weaknesses. Spend a DAY and analyse your result section-wise.
i) Quantitative Ability –
The best way to analyse QA is to prepare an excel sheet for every mock.
Fill this Excel Sheet for every mock, then analyse your weak and strong
points.
● Topics where accuracy, > 80% are your strong areas. Work upon these to minimise the TIME
spent on these questions. Since your basics for this section are strong, try to attempt a maximum number of questions.
● Topics where accuracy is 55 to 75 %, are your improvement areas, basics are strong but these areas
require practice.
● Topics where accuracy is < 50% are your weak areas. You need to work on these areas as the
concepts are not clear.
➢ Don’t neglect your right answers, people generally ignore the correctly attempted questions. But, getting a question correct is not enough, it’s also important to get it correct in decent time. If you spend 3 or more minutes on one question, it has probably done more harm than good.
➢ Check if you can find any shortcut (other than the answer booklet) which is
easier for you to understand. Post the question in CAT Preparation-iQuanta group, you’ll probably get a better solution from Indrajeet and iQuanta team.
➢ Practice the questions where you spent too much time and if you are not able to solve these questions within two minutes, in the next mocks, mark them and move forward. You can always come back, if the time allows.
➢ Prepare a list of questions that you skipped but should have attempted. Try to solve these in the next mock.
➢ Attempt all the RC’s that you missed the first time also try to categorise the passage – science and technology, economics, philosophy, abstract or a just an author’s take on any particular thing.
➢ Analyse the “TONE” for every RC in the mock test.
➢ Analyse the reason for the incorrect attempts, try to understand the author’s point of view and compare it to your point of view. This will also help in cases where two options are similar to each other.
➢ Note down all the new words in the RCs and find their meanings. This would help you improve your vocabulary.
➢ For Non-RC questions categorize the problems into summary, inference, para completion and check where you’ve made a maximum number of mistakes and mark the topic which you think requires your attention.
➢ For Para jumbles, read why all the other options are INCORRECT. This will give you a clarity of thoughts. Attempting para jumble in non-RC should never be the priority.
iii) DI And LR –
➢ For DI and LR, solve all the sets that you missed or could not solve.
➢ Note down the time taken to solve this. You must not take more than 15-20 minutes to solve a set.
➢ Check the new concepts in every mock test.
➢ Make a list of these new concepts that you missed while covering those
topics and practice more such questions.
➢ Also analyse, which all sets should have been selected in the test in the priority order also which all should never be selected in the test.
➢ Selection of set is the most important part in the mock and its analysis must be done.
Step 4: Prepare A Sheet –
Once you have analysed your scores, make a sheet of the following:
i) New quant formulas
ii) New strategies used in DI-LR
iii) New grammar rules learnt in VA
iv) New words and their meanings
➢ Re-appear for the same mock in 5-7 days.
➢ Compare actual performance this time with expected performance.
➢ You should be able to complete it in not more than 120-130 minutes.
➢ Make sure you don’t underperform due to time pressure.
➢ Use shorter ways to solve every question. Try to eliminate options using
logic.
Step 6: Prepare A Strategy For Next Mock –
For your next mock, prepare a strategy to complete the exam with maximum accuracy. Solve the questions from your strong areas first. Just aim at increasing accuracy, getting maximum right answers in minimum span of time.