With less than two months to go, the aspirants of CAT 2019 are at the most stressful times of their preparation. Anxiety and anticipation often bring their morale down. "Am I going in the right direction? Are these the right study materials? What if the questions are different from what I have solved? I keep forgetting the formulae of quants. DI and LR are complicated to solve, even while solving at home. How am I going to score in this subject, especially when the questions of DI&LR are so unpredictable? How many questions to solve in DI&LR to fare well in the exam? Why do I do so much negative in VA&RC? Para-jumbles are confusing; I am often split between options. Are the most obvious answers usually wrong in VA&RC? Do I go with my gut feeling? Is that why I get so many questions wrong? I can't read fast enough to solve RC problems." - The questions are endless, and most students make the mistake of trying to solve a question before understanding why the examiner chose to ask that question. In a series of articles, I will try to answer each of these questions, drawing from my personal experience.Let's begin with a simple premise; CAT exam is not tough to crack if you are disciplined, and you have your basics right. I'll come back to discipline later. Let's try and understand what does having 'right basics' mean. Every question that appears in CAT has a purpose. That purpose is to test the ability of a student on various fundamental concepts. If you get the idea right, then it boils down to the basics of logic and calculations. The obvious question is, if it's that easy, why can't everyone do it! Well, there are questions with varying degrees of complexity. Then there is the ticking clock on your screen that adds to your stress – the differentiator between a 99th percentile, and 95th percentile is the stress and time management and the differentiator between a 95th percentile, and 90th percentile is the know-how of the question. So there you have it, get your concept right, you are in the 95th percentile. Get your stress under control and manage your clock; you are in the 99th percentile. It's that simple. Having the right approach to solving a problem is a necessary but insufficient condition for scoring well in CAT.Another question that may arise is, what are the difficulty levels of a CAT question paper? There is the 'easy' question that we all know of. It takes less than 45 seconds on average if the problem clicks on the first read. However, in the exam, this time may vary from student to student, depending on their concentration level and exam practice. Moderately severe questions are the differentiators, perhaps the most sought after questions in CAT. Your percentile in CAT depends directly on how many problems of this type you can solve. The average time to answer these types of questions is 2 – 3 minutes, and they form a large proportion of each year's CAT paper. My suggestion is that students should practice these questions the most and try to solve them in examination with maximum accuracy. Finally, there the questions with a high level of difficulty that tests your ability to dig deep and get to the root of the problem. If you do get it right, it's a big bonus. However, I would suggest students beware of the time-killers. Selecting which questions to attempt and which ones to leave is an art that you must master if you want to move up in scoring. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts for this. The only way to learn this art is by practice, which is where 'discipline' comes into the picture.What is discipline? Let me share an anecdote with you. Last year, I was working for TCS while preparing for my CAT. Every day, after ten hours of work, I come back to my room, cook my food while watching videos on various 'types' of questions and how to solve them – the traps and pitfalls of VA&RC, the do's and don'ts of DI&LR, and the tricks and shortcuts of quants. I would then spend hours on finding those types of questions, apply the concepts I learned, and see if my speed and accuracy improved. It's not an impressive work at all; in fact, most of us do study this way. But I did it, for one-years straight without fail. That takes perseverance and gut. Persistence is going to be your biggest challenge, not only for CAT preparation but at every juncture of your career in the future. I would recommend students to work on this part the most, for if you are disciplined, clearing CAT is just a matter of time. Finally, we come to the examiner's intent behind a CAT problem. CAT questions are application-based problems that test how quickly and accurately students can identify the underlying idea. I would give a simple example. We know that there are 10C2 ways of selecting two items out of 10 identical items. An extrapolation of this simple concept can create a variety of questions. For example, if you are asked to determine the number of diagonals in a deacon, the problem can be answered by a simple formula 10C2-10 (subtracting the number of sides from all lines that can be formed by ten non-collinear points). If a student 'gets the idea,' the rest is just details. I would advise students that once they identify the problem, they must invest sufficient time and care while solving them. Calculation mistakes are unforgiving in an exam set-up. More than the number of problems, the accuracy determines your score in CAT.With this, I want to conclude this monologue. I hope that you benefit from the advice and takeaways from the article. I would delve deeper into the questions that I raised at the beginning of the article in the coming days — all the best for your preparations.