Preparing for entrance exams is a long, overwhelming, and exhausting journey. There will be times when you would start doubting yourself or would want to leave for comfort. But a few months in the right direction will help you sit and be a part of the right MBA college. So, this is a starting guide for this year’s MBA and management exam aspirants. Since the first major exam is CAT 2025, we will begin with CAT 2025 Preparation tips and planning. 
Breaking down the CAT exam syllabus into its three sections: Quantitative Aptitude, DILR, and VARC we will discuss how to approach these in the beginning. I have linked additional articles at each step that might be helpful for you.
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VARC (Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning)
The verbal section of CAT 2025 will most probably follow the previous year's structure having 4/5 RCs with about 4 questions. Similarly, the VA part includes 10 questions with a few of them being TITA (type in the answer type questions) which are free of negative marking.
For Reading Comprehension developing reading habits while understanding the text is important. A good reading speed will help you but that is not the most important factor. Understanding what the author is trying to say is more important. Here is a compiled list of RC sources for the past 7 years in CAT. Read a recent RC from the links in the table in this article and analyze how comfortable you are with the words and structure.
- For starters, do not jump to difficult passages and blogs like Aeon. First start with simpler texts of Hindu, Mint, ET, and Smithsonian and increase the level of difficulty gradually.
- If your English is on the weaker side, do this exercise for the first month: Summarize every text you read for practice and see how much you remember. This will help you to retain the main idea of the text.
- Should I focus solely on vocabulary? - This is subjective to your time constraint. If you are working, practicing RCs as a whole then vocab. CAT does not have direct word-meaning-type questions. You should not learn or try to memorize word meanings from dictionaries or word cards as its retention will be on the lower side. Instead,
- Circle/ mark words when you read. Try to understand the meaning without it and come back to it later.
- Word Power Made Easy is a good guide for starting (not a necessity and should be taken only when you have time)
- Must Read Books for CAT 2025
For VA, the main question types include:
| Fill in the blanks |
Para/ Sentence completion |
| Odd one out |
Summary |
You should start with going through CAT PYQs for VA and identify which of these question types trouble you and practice more of that. In the upcoming blogs, I will focus on how to approach each of them better.
RCs have many different genres like science, history, philosophy, economics, etc. If you are not into reading start with stories/topics which interest you. After the initial practice starts with timed practice/ sectional mocks.
Hear the VARC Topper’s Insight to Ace the Section
Free CAT 2025 Mocks!
CAT 2025 Preparation: Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning
This becomes a break or make section for many. If you are weak in co-relating and puzzle solving you should start with sudoku solving apart from the subject-specific practice you put in. This will come in handy when you will be solving sets through a table or matrix approach.
LRDI preparation can be broken down into parts:
- Choosing the right set: One which you are comfortable with/ the one which has fewer variables. Start the practice of scanning through the paper from the initial days only. There will be times when you will be able to solve a few questions from multiple sets but not a set entirely.
- Exposure to different varieties: CAT 2024 saw a re-inclusion of graph-based sets after many years. Practicing and comfort with different types of questions is the key when the paper is tough. Choose a topic and go on solving 2-3 sets from easier to 2-3 to difficult level.
- PYQs are a very important part of the preparation for this section. Anyone who feels this section is their weakness should go through the PYQs multiple times and try solving closer sets to those topics.
- Watch this video to see the right way to solve DILR sets.
- After you cover a certain portion of the DILR set types start taking regular mocks/ timed tests to see if you are working under time pressure.
- Read the topper’s story: 77 to 99 Percentile in DILR in a year.
CAT 2025 Preparation: QA (Quantative Aptitude)
Quants is one of those sections in the CAT exam which has a vast syllabus. This section becomes a night terror for those who have been out of practice from this section for a long time. This is the last section of the exam which means you will be exhausted and evaluating your previous section’s performance.
- First things first- Cover the heavyweights of the exam Arithmetic and algebra. Side by side you can also cover the basics of the Number System.
- Should you be sticking to just these two topics? No, starting now you will have ample time to complete other topics like geometry, and PnC as well. See, everyone will be doing arithmetic and algebra. The edge comes when you will cover other smaller topics. These topics usually have easier questions which can compensate for the difficult ones and arithmetic and algebra. Additionally, many questions will be integrated with the smaller topics.
- Maintain a handy formula book/ Imp question types book.
- After initial conceptual clarity, solve 20-25 questions from that topic. Keep revisiting older topics when you complete newer ones. Keep a day fixed for revision, especially in quants. You might think you will come back to it towards the later months of Oct/Nov, but trust me it won't work all the time.
- Make one out of Algebra and Arithmetic your essential strength. As important to cover the basics of smaller topics, Arithmetic and Algebra form about 77 % of the QA section. Out of the 16-17 questions from these topics, even if you can solve 12 questions with 75% accuracy you have 9 correct answers totaling a score of 24.
- Have a look at what the CAT QA 99.9 percentiler has to say!
So here, this detailed article for the question- where to start preparing for CAT 2025 ends. We will be sharing in-depth, section-wise strategies, free resources, and the previous year’s analysis soon. Stay tuned and add to our mailing list ;)
