Satyajit Mohanty will be joining IIM Calcutta in its 59th MBA Batch, Class of 2024. He is a 2020 batch of Electrical Engineering graduates from Odisha University of Technology and Research. He has over 18 months of work experience at Deloitte Consulting in a client-facing role. He scored a stellar 99.73%ile in CAT 2021. He scored 93%, 86%, and 8.49 CGPA in 10th/12th/Graduation respectively. Being a General Engineer Male candidate with not-so-top-notch academic scores, IIM Calcutta was the only IIM from BLACKI that extended him an interview call. In this interview, he shares his CAT preparation strategy, and his advice to future CAT aspirants!
Q) Please Share Your Score And Percentile With Our Readers.
Overall scaled score: 113.55, Overall percentile: 99.73 | VARC - Score: 47.31, Percentile: 99.26 | LRDI - Score: 38.00, Percentile: 99.64 | QA - Score: 28.24, Percentile: 97.15
Q) Please Share Your Month-Wise Preparation Insights For Upcoming Aspirants.
I started preparing for CAT in May 2021. During the initial months of my preparation, I solved practice questions from every topic to get a hang of it. Then I enrolled for TIME's mock tests in June 2021. My mock performance analysis helped me understand my strengths and weaknesses. I put more effort into the topics where I was slow at - such as the LR section in its entirety, topics such as Speed-Time, Time-work in QA, etc. I was able to enhance my LR solving skills gradually through practice, and I decided to skip Speed-Time / Time-work questions in CAT. For me, the six months period, i.e. May 2021 - Nov 2021 was sufficient to prepare for CAT.
Q) Please Share The Section-Wise Strategies Followed By You During Preparation.
For VARC, my prep strategy was to be able to read through RCs quickly and understand most of them during the first read. This is something I used to struggle with during my undergrad days. I would then visit each question, quickly identify the relevant paragraph associated with it and try to figure out the closest possible correct answer. To achieve this, I had made a habit of reading books, articles, and editorials regularly. Doing so enhanced my reading speed and also helped me gain a variety of knowledge for future interviews. Verbal ability topics came naturally to me, I never put any effort to prepare for them. In LRDI, I was naturally quick at the DI section, so I never put effort there. I was considerably slow at the LR section - for which I solved lots of practice sets and wired my brain gradually. My final strategy was to pick the DI sets first during CAT, solve them and then utilize the remaining time to solve as many LR sets as I could. In QA, my strategy was to simply practice as many questions as I can. I was comfortable with the syllabus, I used to score 99.9+ %ile during mocks consistently and I was confident of acing the section in CAT.
Overall, I took sectional tests for practice in the topics I fared poorly during mocks. It helped me enhance my problem-solving skills, especially in LR section. On an average, I invested four hours per section in a week for practice, excluding the time invested for mocks.
Q) Please Talk About The Role Of Mock Tests While Preparing.
I started taking mocks in June 2021. I took only one mock test package - TIME's AIMCATs. I wrote 20 AIMCAT mocks in total, but focused more on sectional mocks. I took 2 mocks on average each month from June to Sept (initial mocks are all about experimentation) and 6 mocks each in Oct and Nov. My target percentile for CAT 2021 was 99.90 for practical purposes, which could have given me interview calls from IIMs - C, L, K, maybe A, and FMS.
To achieve this, I knew I would need to score 65% marks out of the total, which would mean attempting 75% questions and being 90% accurate in approximate numbers. I targetted the same metrics during mocks. During my mock performance analysis, I would always try to figure out which topics I am slow at - I would then try to enhance my problem-solving skills on those topics through practice. I would also try to decide if certain topics are best left ignored during CAT if I didn't see any sign of significant improvement.
This is also major learning for all aspirants - we do not need to solve or attempt all the questions in the paper, we can safely skip 15-20% of the paper to still target 99.90%ile. Ultimately, appearing for and analyzing multiple mocks helped me prepare my final strategy which I also tested in my later mocks. I would pick 60% of the RCs first, then complete all the VA questions and then come back to the 40% RCs in the remaining time and attempt as many as I could. I would attempt all the DI sets in LRDI first, and then pick the doable LR sets in the remaining time. I would also completely ignore Speed-Time/Time-Work questions in the QA section and focus on the rest. I was cognizant of the possibility of uncertainties in the exam pattern, but I made up my mind to improvise during CAT and deal with them if they arose.
Q) Is There Anything Else That You'd Like To Add?
During my journey, I realized that the formula for success in CAT is equal to Preparation times Luck. Luck is not in our control, but our preparation is, which should be maximized to the fullest extent possible. Secondly, in today's date, for the majority of B-Schools, the CAT percentile holds very less weightage. That doesn't mean one should take CAT for granted, but one should also focus equally or more on various other parameters such as academic profile, interview preparation, and extra-curricular. To give perspective - keeping all other parameters equal, for IIM Lucknow - a person with 97%ile in CAT and 97% in 12th (CBSE) will fetch a similar composite score as a person with 99.7%ile in CAT and 86% in 12th (CBSE). For IIM Kozhikode, a Female or a Non-Engineer candidate with 95%ile in CAT will fetch a similar composite score as a Male Engineer candidate with 99.7%ile in CAT. For IIM Rohtak, 20% weightage is given to academic/gender diversity, so the maximum composite score a General Engineer Male candidate could score hypothetically is 80/100 (if he scores 300/300 in CAT and 20/20 in PI) - this would also not fetch him a seat since the composite score cutoff for final admission offer was 80.52/100 as per RTI records. Ref: cutt.ly/4Hscgcq
My preparation for interviews started alongside CAT preparation in May 2021 - I put 80% of all my efforts into preparation for interview rounds and 20% for CAT 2021. I was fortunate to have my strategy work for me - I was able to convert all my interview calls in the first list itself, barring FMS where I was waitlisted at 67 (an easy convert statistically), and SPJIMR, which I couldn't convert after its G2 interview.