CAT 2019 Topper Interview: 99.93 Percentiler Ahsaas Sharma Shares his Exam Strategy

Q: Did you join any coaching institute? How does coaching institute help in CAT preparation?

A: I had enrolled in TIME, Chandigarh for my preparation and they were generous and helpful enough to come to my college IIT Ropar every weekend to take classes for our batch of  around 20 students. TIME helped me initially by assisting me in making my prep strategy and then the teachers were good in terms of helping with revising known concepts and understanding the newer ones. While it is for sure possible to crack CAT without coaching but coaching institutes play a very important role as catalysts to your prep and hinder most of the obstacles with good analysis of your mocks, good advice on strategy, readily available people for doubts and queries and of course an organized way of  teaching and strategizing.

Q: How many CAT mock tests did you attempt and how important is a mock test series?

A: I attempted around 15-20 full mock tests before the actual CAT and regularly kept a track of my score. I personally feel the focus should be on the raw score rather than the percentile since percentile is very subjective and relative in nature and increasing your raw score is something you can objectively target. My raw score in mocks always varied sometimes it was 150 sometimes 190 so it was never about being happy or sad about my score but about analyzing where I went wrong and this is what everybody should aim for. CAT mock tests are very important in the sense that they are the only objective indicator of how much you have progressed and your average performance in the last 5 mocks gives you a clear idea of your performance on the exam day. Thus, analyzing my mocks deeply and noting down my mistakes is something I did.

Q: What was your exam day strategy?

A: My target on the exam day was to achieve a raw score of 180 somehow which could have fetched me at least 99.6.

For VARC, my reading speed was good so I could always go through the section once in about 40-45 minutes and thus always attempted around 32-34 questions. This time, the RC’s were a bit tough so I took 50 minutes to go through the section and could eventually attempt 33. My strategy in VARC was to attempt almost all questions as most of the difficult questions have two confusing options so probability and expected value tells that with decent luck on your side, when attempting the tough questions, you will always add positively to your score and that is what happened.

For LRDI, I always solved 4 sets correctly and could do about 2 questions from the 5^th set. Thus, I got a score of 45-50 in mocks but this time LRDI was relatively easy and I completed  5 sets in 40 minutes and read 2 more sets which I felt were doable but in the state of excitement of doing 7 sets, I missed a condition in the 6^th set and messed it up which decreased my LRDI score from a possible 65 to 55. This is something I would advise everyone don’t get over excited if you find a section easy and stick to your strategy of being patient otherwise it can prove to be a disaster.

For QA, I wanted a score of 70-75 and thus wanted to attempt around 28 get 26 correct but I got stuck on 3-4 question which I could have skipped and that resulted in me attempting only 25 questions but when the answer key came I was surprised I got all 25 correct something which I had never expected. This 100% accuracy increased my raw score by about 10.

Q: Any tips for future CAT aspirants?

A:  My advise would be don’t try replicating others strategies but make your own strategies. You are the only one who really knows his strengths and weaknesses no one else knows better. Be patient and don’t get too depressed or happy with your scores in mocks they tell you a lot about your performance but not everything about your performance and there is always a scope of improvement in your prep even if you score good. It is more important to focus on sticking to your strategy, making realistic targets and believing in yourself that you can achieve that target.

Q: Which IIMs /Institutes are you targeting?

A:  As most of the CAT aspirants in the country I am also targeting IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta and would be really happy to go into either of these.

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