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Take it from me - if you are not good at VARC, you will have to put in a lot of effort to get through it. Effort?? Umm might both be the right and the wrong word here. I'd say working on VARC needs discipline and persistence.
Before I go ahead on how to prepare with it, a quick fact - I scored 97%ile with a scaled score of 64. Not the best score but I can surely help you reach this point.
In a typical CAT VARC section, you will have close to 5 Reading Comprehensions ranging from easy to difficult, mostly of moderate level. Ideally, each reading comprehension should take around 8 to 10 min of your time. Effectively, you should give about 40 min to the reading comprehension and keep the rest for the verbal ability section.
Verbal ability comprises of questions across multiple types - para jumbles, identify the sentence which doesn't form a part of a coherent paragraph, summary based questions. Usually, these questions are high scoring and easy to solve but require good speed and grasping skills. You do not want to cut down your marks in this section.
The reason I say VARC to be a little on the moderately difficult side is that it needs you to be high in accuracy and attempt at the same time. As stated in my last article, CAT is about converting your hard work into smart work. The same holds true here too. You need to be selective about the type of questions you do in an RC - summary based, identifying the meaning of the mentioned word/phrase in the RC, facts stated in the passage, etc. These questions, in particular, are on the easier side. Comparatively, the tone of the passage/author and questions regarding the author's interpretation are on the tougher side, which I prefer leaving as soon as I come across them. I will save my time not attempting them and put in verbal where I can score a lot more. Taking all the possible focus areas I mentioned above, I prepared the table showing the scoring opportunities. The green entries are the scoring areas that you can focus on. It should (58 marks) get you close to 95%ile in VARC. Post this it's your speed and accuracy that matters.
So far we have understood the potential scoring areas. The question remains - How to prepare for VARC?
I haven't been a big fan of reading till the time I realized that for two straight years, VARC was one section that was pulling back my CAT overall percentile. VARC does need you to work on your reading.
Reading doesn't mean books only. But if you do that, it will help you a lot. In my case, I read lots of news articles. Mutil-benefits that you may get out of it - develop your reading speed, build on your retention ability, get to know new words, keep yourself update with the current affairs and build on the opinions presented in the editorials which will help you in your GD/PIs as well. I used to read ~3-4 articles a day (approx. 30 min) during transit between home and office.
This helped me a lot with improving my speed and understanding and I felt more confident when it came to attempting mocks. Additionally, I used to do a thorough analysis of the mock tests as well.
At times I would do 3-4 RCs (laptop/mobile app), timed 10 minutes each. That way, you can utilize small gaps in your daily schedule and evaluate your improvement as well. Keep a track of the frequently occurring question types - summary based, tone of the passage, factual description, meaning of the phrase/word, etc. This shall help you clearly understand which questions you have to attempt and which to leave in CAT. You can practice these questions form Arun Sharma or take any online test series.
In my mock exams, I would try to solve as many RC questions in the first go as I could. Usually, my preparation method helped me solve around 60% of the questions from an RC in the first go. These shall be the easier ones with ~90% accuracy. This shall take me 25-30 min. In the next 10-15 minutes, I shall take up the Verbal Ability section and do close to 8-9 questions. Jump back to the RCs and maximize my score from here on.