My CAT 2021 score is 99.62 percentile(VARC-99.63,DILR-98.89,QA-97.1). I also got 99.53 percentile in XAT 2021. I started my half-hearted preparation from around November 2019 and started preparing seriously from April 2020 given the amount of time due to Covid. At first, just like any other non-engineer, I dreaded QA. I still remember my first mock QA percentile which was just 52.2. My VARC was decent given I am an avid reader and my DILR was at a moderate level.
Like you might have guessed, my Achilles heel was QA and I started working on it. Day in day out, I focused only on solving more and more quant questions. I could see my knowledge level and speed increasing. But guess what? My QA mock scores never increased.
It was in the 60s-70s range till CAT 2020 with occasional jumps to 80s. I was devastated and at a certain point in time thought of giving up preparation because I did not know what else to do. Then I realised that
what is in my control is to practice and improve. So I kept giving mocks and found out the mistakes I did like spending too much time on some questions, holding on to hard questions, etc.
Even on the day of CAT, I was not confident about my QA. My aim was to just clear cutoffs QA so that it does not affect my shortlists. I wrote CAT 2020 in slot 2 and it had one of the most confusing VARC sections and a very tough DILR section. But I kept my calm and solved whatever I could. I still remember that I had solved only 4 questions in DILR and there were only 10 mins to go.
The key was not to panic and keep solving and fortunately I did that which got me the solutions for a 6 question set which saved my DILR score(98.89 percentile).
At last my most dreaded section came and to be honest it was a bit easier than expected. My plan was to
solve only the easy and medium questions and leave out the difficult ones and I did exactly that. And just doing that fetched me a 97 percentile in quants which was way beyond my expectations. And I got 99.62 percentile overall which was also above my expectations(expected 97). Not even once I touched 99 percentile overall during my mocks(gave around 50).
If there is one thing I learned from this journey is to never lose your cool. A famous Zen proverb says, "TO BE CALM IS THE HIGHEST ACHIEVEMENT OF THE SELF". And every aspirant needs to be calm whether it be during solving tricky questions during preparation, while getting disappointing mock scores or even when you get a surprisingly difficult CAT paper(EG: CAT 2020).
We just need to do what's in our control and the rest takes care of itself
CHEERS AND ALL THE BEST
STAY HOME AND STAY SAFE[also prepare :) ]
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