A year ago, before joining MDI Gurgaon, I was one of the CAT aspirants among lakhs who had the same feeling of uncertainty as anyone else. Straight after engineering, I decided to take a year gap to prepare for CAT 2018 with complete rigour. To put things into perspective, CAT 2018 was my second attempt and I had scored 90.7% OA in CAT 2017.
Building My Basics
Phase 1 of my preparation: I had somewhat prepared for CAT 2017 and although I didn’t take any mocks that year, I worked on my basics. Before my CAT 2017 attempt, I enrolled myself in Career Launcher Classroom Program. It helped me to clear the basic concepts and gave me an idea of what kind of questions was being asked in CAT. During this time, I solved Arun Sharma chapter by chapter and questions from the Career Launcher online portal and class hand-outs. But since I took CAT 2017 quite lightly, I ended up scoring less.
Phase 2 of my preparation: For CAT 2018, I started my preparation only in July. I had around 5 months left and so I gave my all to my preparation. Here’s a detailed glimpse of my preparation journey:
VARC:
- Although I could solve all the VARC questions in the 1 hour time frame, my accuracy would fluctuate a lot. I read “The Hindu” for 2 hours every day and it helped me a lot to develop my concentration and reading skills.
- Sectional tests helped me to understand what kind of questions I was most comfortable with and finally I started laying more focus on that.
- I was enrolled in IMS and the IMS Ebook on 500 important questions helped me a lot for VARC as their answers are very comprehensive and helped me understand the logic to reject certain options.
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LRDI:
- My weakest section was LRDI and I also didn’t have much idea on the types of questions asked. I solved all the questions from Elitesgrid videos on Youtube which helped me to improve my foundation.
- Practised daily sets from past year mock papers which were closer to CAT.
- Took several sectional tests to prepare my strategy for the LRDI section.
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Quantitative Aptitude:
- Since my basics in Quants were clear, I started taking sectional tests directly. That helped me to identify my weak and strong areas and after analysing that, I solved multiple questions on a particular topic rather than solving questions chapter by chapter.
- Whenever in a material, I would find a difficult question; I would circle it and review it after a week to see if I was able to solve the question.
- For every new concept that I came across in Quants, I would note it down and I went through my notes once every week.
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Also read: Most Important Topics For CAT 2020's Quant Section - Analysing Past Years' CAT Papers
Resources Followed
CAT 2017: Solved Arun Sharma, Career Launcher Online Portal and Career Launcher Classroom Material
CAT 2018: Solved questions on IMS and TIME online portal, followed Sarvesh Verma for Quants, watched Elitesgrid videos for LRDI and read “The Hindu” for VARC. Also, I took more than 100 sectional tests all together from TIME and IMS. I took around 30 full-length mocks from IMS and TIME.
I used to post my doubts on Facebook groups for CAT which helped me a lot to clear my problems immediately.
Also read: How Tough Is The DI-LR Section Really? - Analysing Past Five Years' CAT Papers
Mocks
Although I was preparing very seriously for CAT 2018, my mock scores either didn’t seem to improve or I would make very slow progress. Every time I would try to apply a different strategy but my mock overall percentile would not cross 87-90%. Very rarely, it crossed 95%. I would take around 3-4 hours to analyse the mocks, made notes of my errors and reviewed them later.
Also read: How To Analyse A Mock Test | Ankit Gupta, CAT 99.5+ %ile, IIM Lucknow
How Did Mocks and sectional tests help me?
VARC: After taking multiple sectional tests, I could master the art of solving a full set of RC in 10-12 minutes. My accuracy started improving slowly and I learnt that I didn’t have to take up RC sets sequentially. I started with the sets that looked the easiest to me and then proceeded to the more complex ones.
LRDI: Initially, I could not manage my time in this section because I would end up selecting the wrong set and wasted time. I learnt that one doesn’t have to necessarily solve all the questions of a particular set. While in the beginning it would take me 15-20 minutes to solve one set, with practice, I could bring it down to 8-10 minutes.
Quants: In Quants, the most important thing is managing time and that can happen not by answering all the questions but by recognising difficult questions in the first glance. And this can come only with practice. As I took more and more sectional tests, I could start skipping questions which would take more time and started concentrating first on the ones which could be done easily.
Suggestions
Whenever I would score less in mocks, it would be the biggest reason for my demotivation. But no matter at what stage of preparation you are, take as many mocks and sectional tests as possible and analyse them properly. It is crucial to keep up with it as it’s the only instrument that can tell you how to improve and where to focus your energy on.
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Comments
shivani biswal
With the mock season starting... really needed this.. thank you! ..
15 Jun 2020, 09.59 AM