“Life is more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party” - Jimmy Buffet
I write this article to capture the various pieces of learnings I have gained over my journey of CAT, as a part of my scavenger hunt to land up in “The Red Building of Dreams” and to help MBA aspirants and students better their strategy.
First things first, CAT scores you in percentiles and hence it’s imperative that you see what percentile you need for the colleges you are targeting. I knew I needed around 200 to offset my poor academics for FMS and IIM C. The breakup for this was: VARC – 80+, LRDI- 40+, QA-70+. I decided the breakup in this way because I knew I was good in VARC, that I could get pretty good in QA and that LRDI would require efforts to get to 40. It is necessary to define the targets and work accordingly to progress.
- Peace of mind: Staying calm lets you be aware and think logically, and take decisions accordingly. Anyone giving you tips will tell you that it is important to stay calm while giving any paper. So it’s important to figure out avenues for your calmness. For me, it was musical instruments and basketball and hanging out with friends
- Ability to Take Risks: I left my job to prepare for CAT and I was told by many it is not a very wise decision to take. And I agree. But I believe it takes more than mere rationality to get you where you want to go. And while there are many factors that may impact your performance, I believe it is important to have the self-confidence to test your abilities rather than looking for external factors to blame the shortcomings later on.
- Tenacity at problem-solving: Very often people claim that they worked really hard but the results did not show. I find it a little difficult to believe, because when I did not work hard, I failed and I knew that. When I worked hard, I seem to have had some manner of success. It is important to have a structured approach while attempting any question. You will see this at play when you see a very lengthy QA question, a very long and wordy DI set or an abstract RC passage, as the case may be for each of us depending on weakness. While you certainly should not waste time on sets that you won’t solve, you shouldn’t be skipping them just because you got bored.
- Planning and Review: We are very rigid when it comes to planning not allowing for flexibility. We hope to find a ONE Plan solution and hope that it will see us through. When this fails, we usually doubt our abilities, our luck, our materials and a number of other things. We never doubt the plan. It is a very common blind spot for most people. Let’s be honest, no one can plan for any and every eventuality. Cinderella’s supposedly perfectly fitting shoe fell off, didn’t they? So let us say you attempted 27 questions in a mock and 20 of them were correct. During analysis, firstly try to understand what went wrong in those 7 questions, because not only did you waste 15-16 mins on those questions but also lost 4-5 marks in negative marking. Was it because of silly mistakes? Or was it because of lack of complete conceptual clarity? Or was it pure guesswork?
Another blunder people commit is relying on plans made by someone else. This is equivalent to playing on someone else’s controller settings. What you need to do is figure out your strengths and weaknesses and prepare accordingly. Make a short term plan after analysing mock tests focusing on the area you feel needs immediate attention. Here is an important tip I received from a friend for DILR: Take a DILR paper of any mock, don’t solve the paper (I’m not kidding here!) but note down the level of difficulty of every set after reading/observing the set for approximately 2 minutes. After you complete this process, now solve the paper and compare the difficulty level of every set with the rating you gave it earlier. Analyse which traps in the language of the sets deceived you and got the better of you because these tricks are going to be used again and again against you till you learn to pick out the ruse and eventually ace the CAT. If you master this skill, you can judge a set and estimate the level of difficulty of the paper with fairly high accuracy and you will be in a better position to handle the time and marks pressure because you would know what the level of the paper is and therefore what you would need to get your desired percentile
- Learning from mistakes: In a season of 20-30 mocks, you will probably fail a lot of times. My lowest score in DILR was 4. Yes, single-digit. My lowest raw score overall was 79. Please understand that failing is critical. Failure in trial runs is used to modify your plans and grab some much-needed reality. Feedback mechanisms are critical for any system, and your drive towards the CAT is one such system.
- The Book of Mistakes: This is a copy of all your errors, all that you found lacking in your preparation, the concepts you keep forgetting, the sums you know concepts for but keep messing up. This copy will teach you more than any teacher and any video.
All the best. Hope this helps you at least a little in your pursuit of your dream B-School