IIFT Tips By Abhinav Kumar, IIFT 99.94%ile - UPL"IIFT" Series #2

My UPSC examination results were out in October and after the results, I had to take a very pragmatic call to appear for management entrance examinations on such short notice but I wanted to upskill myself and be at the same level as my peers from under graduation. So, Instead of taking the UPSC results as a setback, I decided to channelize that energy into appearing for the management entrance tests. I had a little over a month to prepare for CAT and other management entrance tests and I utilized my time in only taking full-length mocks.

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Could you enlighten the aspirants a little with your preparation strategy and how you approached the IIFT entrance exam?

As I didn’t have time on my side, I decided to concentrate on mocks as that was the best way for me to gauge my performance. I remember scoring 60 percentile on my first mock and thinking if I had made the wrong call in appearing for the entrance exams with such a short amount of preparation. But I believed in myself and took around 2 mocks a day continuously for a month from IMS & CareerLauncher and started seeing results. I would analyse the mocks thoroughly by going back and reading up on concepts that I was not familiar with.

DILR was my weakest section and I improved my performance in this section solely by focusing on questions from previous year papers. I noticed that certain question types like Venn Diagrams and Pie-Charts were repetitive so I made it a point to attempt more questions of similar nature in mocks.

For Quantitative Aptitude, I relied on Arun Sharma and started exploring questions that were at a difficulty of Level 3 and above. Considering I had started my preparation late, I decided on focusing more on attempting a few questions under a particular concept as this enabled me to prepare for different areas.

For VARC, I practised sentence ordering and other variations of the same using practice material on IMS and CareerLauncher. I was experienced in reading a lot of varied articles because of UPSC preparation and so my only practice for RC was in full-length mocks.

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What was your strategy for the Exam Day?

I approached exam day with a pre-determined strategy based on the analysis of my mock scores. As I was strong in General Knowledge, I allotted a time of around 3 mins for the section, and completing a section in 3 mins gave me momentum that I could carry forward throughout the paper. From my mock scores, I came to a conclusion that VARC was a section where I could get maximum marks in a limited amount of time therefore, I decided to allot around 45 mins to VARC. I allotted 35 mins for LRDI and targeted to solve 3 sets. The remaining time was set aside for QA as it was a section that I was comfortable with doing at the very end.

Also Read: IIFT 2022 Tips By Tarika Rastogi, IIFT 100%iler - UPL"IIFT" Series #1

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Any final tips that you would like to give to the aspirants out there?

• Brush up on basics and keep revising the formula
• Solve Mocks and focus more on analysis
• Go through compendiums for General Knowledge during free time
• Plan your strategy for Exam Day

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