VARC has been a trouble maker for most of the engineers out there. I was not any exception. In my previous attempt of CAT 2019, I scored a meagre 56 percentile partly owing to my lack of preparation and partly due to the panic attack that took a toll on me on the D-day. So, I geared up myself for CAT 2020 knowing my weakest area was VARC and major work needs to be done there only.
I started early specifically for VARC somewhere in mid-March. I bought VARC- Wordpandit basic course. I started reading avidly from the articles from various sources which include AEON essays, Smithsonian, AlJazeera, etc. I started reading a lot across different genres varying from science, psychology, history, Anthropology, etc to get myself comfortable with anything or everything that is thrown at me at the d-day. This went on till May mid. After reading for two months I got comfortable with anything thrown at me. I started to understand the topics and the content but now comes the major part of handling RCs, eliminating wrong answers, ad picking up the correct option.
For this, I started solving RC 99 with a timer. I started solving 4 passages daily devoting 12 minutes per passage. Initially, it was so demotivating to see my scores. At that point in time, I started analysing the options in a way that why the given answer is correct, why the answer chosen by me is eliminated, where I went wrong, etc. This gave me an initial approach to solving RCs correctly.
After that from June end onwards I started attempting mocks. Initially, the scores weren't so well, which was kind of demotivating but then I had a good peer group so we used to give the same mocks on the same day and then at the end of the day we were discussing the solution and doing thorough analysis for each of the section. Our analysis time was much more than the time we took for attempting mocks. This way we not only got to learn from our mistakes but also got to know the probable traps where we could get entrapped seeing and understanding the perspective of the peer group with whom I used to analyse.
Slowly and steadily things started to fall in place. Mock scores started to increase by October. From October onwards, I used to give a sectional test of VARC almost every day since the CAT came up with 45 minutes per section. It became a bit easy to manage a sectional Test per day.
On the d-day, I was in slot 1 VARC again came in one of the dreadful forms. I maintained my calm and composure and started to attempt the way I used to do in mocks. This time I did not panic unlike CAT 2019 and things did turn out in my favour and I rose from 56 percentile to 97 percentile.
Tips I would like to give to fellow aspirants to ace the VARC section is to be consistent, read anything or everything across diverse genres, Giving sectionals and mocks won't do the needful, the key here is to analyse them well, understand your flaws, and try not to repeat them in upcoming mocks.
Hope this helps !!