Strategies to score high in CAT 2020

By: Vipin Bihari Yadav

Anxiety and nervousness during the CAT exam may lead to silly errors. Having a clear thought process, setting targets and analyzing mock tests will help you overcome this and enhance your scores.

Common Mistakes to avoid  during CAT

During CAT preparation students commit an identical set of repetitive mistakes. The journey to your final destination, getting admission in IIMs or other reputed MBA college is going to be tough and burdensome. But to ease your CAT preparation journey, you should avoid the following mistakes.

1. Not prying the CAT syllabus.
2. Not devoting enough time to every table.
3. Not formulating a technique or a study plan.
4. Not attempting enough mocks or over attempting them.
5. Not analyzing the mocks test.
6. Procrastination.
7. Negative attitude.
8. Not setting targets.
9. Not having a balanced approach.
10. Spending an excessive amount of time on one’s areas of interest.

How can you maximize your score?

Let us specialize in the primary categories below taking care of silly errors. The silly errors can further be defined into three broad types:

1. Errors of calculation
2. Process-based silly errors
3. Over-reading errors

Do not get nervous and anxious about the exam. For freshers, students or professionals, it is not to be at the top of the world. Giving a successful exam boils all the way down to one key strategy i.e mock tests which are given and analyzed. It is time to target your strengths. The subsequent strategies can facilitate a high score:

• Time and speed – CAT exam has 100 inquiries to be solved in 3 hours. The average time to be spent on each question is around 1 minute 48 seconds.

If you are able to attempt a minimum of 48 questions with 100% accuracy or 60 questions with 80% accuracy, near about scoring 144 marks, you are on your way to score 99% percentile. This also gives you more average time per question. The number of attempts and marks scored can vary on the difficulty level of the paper.

• Accuracy – Accuracy is most significant for any exam point of view. Again return to your mocks and analyze the pattern. What strategy for a selected section helped you score maximum marks? The difficult exam might put restrictions on your ability to maximize your attempts.
• Last-minute revision – The initial minutes within the exam matters a lot since you finish solving many questions within the period compared to the progress, the brain exhausts. Let’s say you've got 10 minutes left with 10 questions in a particular section. Please do not rush, be calm and concentrate and try to attempt as many questions as you can.

About the Author:

Vipin Bihari Yadav is B.Tech. in Information Technology and Mathematical Innovations from Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi.