With less than a month to go now for CAT 2012, most students would be wondering if they really have it in them to make it through the CAT exam. If you identify your weak areas and put in focussed effort to improve upon them, you will increase your chances to crack the CAT. Let us look at each of the areas in CAT and discuss how one can improve on them in the coming one month.
Verbal Ability:
Reading Comprehension: CAT has traditionally been an RC centric paper. The number of passages varies from 3 to 4 with three to four questions per passage.
A few critical factors in RC preparation:
Reading on diverse topics: Increasing familiarity with the kind of topics that appear in CAT will help the students save reading time and also get better on comprehension
Target all direct questions first followed by the inferential questions.
During the Test: Ideally not more than 10 minutes are to be spent per passage and it is to be ensured that all passages are looked at.
Verbal Ability: This includes grammar and word-based questions. For grammar, ensure you practice on the rules of Grammar using your study material or any book like Wren & Martin.
For word-based questions spend 30 minutes everyday on going through a list of most commonly misused words like homophones etc. The root-prefix-suffix method for word learning can help solve fill in the blanks questions in CAT.
Verbal Reasoning: This includes Para Jumbles and Para completion questions. Following are a few approaches to answer these questions:
Identify the introductory statement (this statement would tell us what the paragraph is all about)
Then identify links that would connect the two sentences. These are called connectives. These connectives can be conjunctions (but, and) or can be content connectives like cause–effect, generic to specific etc.
Remember that there are no short cuts to improving upon your VA skills. Practice is the key to success in this section. Spend at least an hour on regular reading every day and another 30 minutes reading CAT kind of passages from various online sources.
Quantitative Ability:
List out the areas/topics to focus on: As the time on hand is only one month, it is imperative that the students choose only those topics for preparation which would give them the maximum return for their time. A two pronged approach needs to be adopted for this
1. Mock-CAT Performance Analysis: Students should have a clear understanding of their comfort level in all Quant topics. Mock-CAT performances should be analyzed at a topic level. The areas where the students have been scoring below par consistently and the areas where the scores have been fluctuating should be the areas of focus.
2. Previous CAT paper analysis: The areas which have been consistently contributing to the CAT exam over the years should be identified and attention should be given to them.
Follow these simple steps while preparing
Understand the basics concepts of the selected topic thoroughly
Write down all the formulae and concepts related to the topic on a chart to use as a ready reckoner
Ensure that you know when a particular formula is to be used
Solve at least 30-40 questions (CAT level) from the concept
Logical Ability
The questions in logic can be broadly said to come from three areas viz. Puzzles, Venn Diagrams & Cubes, Deductions & Logical Connectives.
Of these, the questions on puzzles have been most common followed by Deductions and Venn Diagrams. Working out problems from the Study Material Booklets is often the best way to prepare for the different varieties of Questions that appear in CAT. Puzzle books like those by Shakuntala Devi, George Summers etc. provide exposure to high level logic puzzles and the approaches to tackle them.
The often-repeated word "Practice" is the key to crack the questions based on logic and reasoning. The students should put in as much time as possible in practising questions of different types, both online and on paper.
Data Interpretation:
The skills required to crack questions in DI are
1. Ability to analysis and understand difficult / complicated data
This is a skill which one can acquire through regular practice. The practice needs to involve questions of various difficulty levels and types. One approach would be to start solving all the DI sets from your study material. Once this is done, it is time to move online using 'Online Practice Tests'.
2. Ability to do calculations quickly
Speed of calculations is where the students should focus on, along with practising different sets. Acquiring this skill is often easier said than done as it is difficult to get over the old habits of scribbling numbers on a paper even for simple additions.
The point to be kept in mind when students practise sets as mentioned above is that, they should not only focus on the learning approach but should work out the answers themselves. This should be done in timed manner. The advantage of solving questions under time constraint would be that the students would be forced to increase their speed of calculations.
All the steps discussed above will help in increasing the level of preparation of the students. These, combined with the appropriate test taking strategy will go a long way in belling the CAT.
All the best
The writer is course director of CAT at Triumphant Institute of Management Education Pvt. Ltd (T.I.M.E.)
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