If you do not attend offline coaching classes, the internet can become the most powerful tool for you to prepare for CAT 2018. There are some excellent (and free) resources out there for every aspirant who wants to get that 99+ percentile, but only a few know about them.
Therefore, I have compiled a detailed list of resources for CAT preparation which, if explored diligently, are bound to bolster your CAT preparation. Here is a section-wise approach:
Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension
For most candidates, this section is the most dreadful owing to the extremely close answer options in the Reading Comprehensions. Since the bulk of this section (24 questions out of 34) is from Reading Comprehension, one can imagine that ignoring RC would mean a disastrous result. Now the most common advice given for RC section is to read but here is a catch! It’s just not to read it is more about what you read that matters in an examination like CAT where an in-depth analysis of passages is a must for correctly answering the questions. The following resources are bound to help you out with all sorts of trouble regarding this section-
This site is the best resource for VARC preparation and its founder Prashant Chaddha is a consistent 99+ percentiler in VARC section. The site has tremendous material for CAT preparation with the material for VARC section being the best out of them. There is a page on the site describing the Reading suggestions under "
Daily Reads" section and what this does is that it solves the foremost problem of “what to read for CAT” as it contains some handpicked resources from various international and national newspapers and magazines like NYT, Business Standard etc. Just for the sake of making you understand the importance of these reading suggestions, I would like to mention that 5 out of 6 RCs in CAT -2017 VARC section were from the same resources as that of reading suggestions from this site!
Recently Wordpandit has also launched a complete ultimate course on VARC preparation wherein Wordpandit himself trains the students and provides resources and
strategies for tackling this section.
This is another resource handful for adapting to read passages based on philosophy and psychology domain. Since we are not adept at reading these sorts of passages, hence Reading Comprehensions from philosophy and psychology are bound to upset us in CAT. Therefore these resources, besides the reading suggestions by Wordpandit are bound to help you in enlarging your arena of reading and making you an eclectic reader!
- The Economist GRE Vocabulary-
A superb resource for anyone who wants to consistently improve their vocabulary. It is similar to the Magoosh GRE Vocabulary app, which is another helpful resource.
A lot of us do not have the resources to have a newspaper delivered to our homes every day, nor do we have the time to sit and flip pages. However, the Hindu takes care of all these issues and provides you with a digital copy of the morning newspaper. At the time of writing this article, there is a huge discount that The Hindu is giving out, so please avail that discount for a 5 year subscription at just Rs. 2000.
Quantitative Aptitude-
After VARC, it is time for exploring the resources for Quant section of CAT which in recent years has been easy to moderate, hence can uplift the overall percentile by a huge margin. The resources are-
- Takshzila Learnyst
A huge number of CAT aspirants were heartbroken when Chandrashekhar Singh's famous Takhszila videos were removed from YouTube. They are now back with all of their videos and new improved full-length lectures on QA topics such as Geometry, Number Systems, TSD etc. All of these lectures are completely free of cost and are the most informative resources out there for anyone who has a weak base in Quant.
- Takshzila Shikshak
Different from Takshzila, Takshzila Shikshak has been founded by Ankur Suryavanshi. It is an extremely helpful resource for Quant preparation which provides free of cost You-Tube tutorials in a very comprehensive manner. These videos cover the entire Quant syllabus for CAT along with providing tips and tricks for each question type. The whole syllabus is split into various sections and short videos make learning enriching!
I don’t know exactly who runs this blog (certainly an IMS guy) but whoever runs this blog is a man of great intellect judging by the quality of articles produced on this blog. The concepts available on this site are of a very advanced level, hence it is recommended to first complete the complete tutorials of Takshzila and then wrap your concept building by thoroughly covering this blog. This blog provides intensely mind-blowing rarely found ways of tackling Quant problems and hence becomes very useful for tackling Quant questions in limited time frame!
This is another famous blog which will help you in grasping and applying various quant concepts easily. The whole blog is very famous for other discussions as well which includes exam notifications and discussions related to GDPI rounds of various colleges as well.
If you want to solve some challenging CAT level questions, this is a great question bank. Do look at the solutions as well to get an idea of the various approaches by which one can solve CAT level questions.
Logical Reasoning & Data Interpretation-
For past 3 years, this section has been the make or break section for many aspirants. The difficulty level of the sets asked has been steadily rising over the years because of the mixed LR and DI variety of case-lets. Hence in order to tackle this section, the quality of resources becomes even more important and some prominent of them are-
The previous year’s mock papers of various coaching institutes can be accessed by the above link. Since the level of LRDI in the actual CAT is way too high hence practising with any ordinary book or coaching material is not going to do any good, hence the only way to practice quality sets is by handling the sets in the mocks of coaching institutes.
- Practice LR-DI case-lets from sites of various coaching institutes-
While you may join any coaching institute for guidance, the following sites have a bunch of wide-variety LRDI sets along with their video solutions which will go along a long way in exposing yourself to various sets-
- Learning Roots
- Elites Grid
- PerfectScore - YouTube
- Practising logical puzzles from books-
Since the LR-DI section has no such syllabus, therefore, this makes it imperative for aspirants to improve their logical thinking abilities by practising various logical puzzles from various famous puzzle books like Shankuntala Devi and George Summers (you can buy them online/offline). Solving problems given in these books, one can really improve the logical bent of one’s mind and this will ultimately help in quicker understating of LR-DI problems asked in actual CAT.
All the resources given above should be tried by the aspirants themselves and then followed as per their individual preparation levels. With a word of advice that after exploring these resources you must test yourself with quality mocks till CAT, we come to an end to this article which surely will assist you in your preparation.
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