CAT 2019 Topper Interview: Saathwik Kolluru, 99.99%ile Scorer Shares Preparation Tips!

Saathwik Kolluru scored 99.99 percentile in CAT in his very first attempt. Read how he prepared for the exam.

CAT 2019 Overall Percentile: 99.99

VARC- 99.73

DILR- 99.97

QA- 99.85

Saathwik Kolluru a fourth-year Civil Engineering student at IIT Bombay made it to the toppers list of CAT 2019 exam. He scored 99.99 percentile missing by fraction 100 percentile, which was his ultimate target. A sports enthusiast, Saarthwik loves to watch as well as play football. He also has knack for graphic design and enjoys listening to hard rock music in his free time.
Saathwik wants to make a career in investment banking and consultancy as his passion lies in finance. He has also started working on his passion and done an internship at Nomura. While speaking with Shiksha, he shared his in- depth preparation strategy as well as areas of fallacy one should omit to score a perfect 100. Read on to know his CAT preparation strategy:

Q: Congratulations! Are you satisfied with your CAT result? How much score were you expecting?

A: I was aiming for a 100 percentile with a score above 230 but could not get expected score in quant that was a letdown but nonetheless I am satisfied with the result. However, I had three hurdles during the exam about which I would like to share. First, it was in the VARC section; the passages were very tough but I, knew that if I would have given more time I could have definitely scored good. Therefore, instead of 40 minutes I changed my strategy, gave 46-47 minutes, and got 22/24 correct. The second one was in DILR where I, rushed and started solving. I was not happy with how my VA section went. I could not crack the first set in 8 minutes so I rolled back to my previous strategy of attempting sets in the order of increasing difficulty. Third hurdle was in the quant section where I got stuck in two consent questions but was over confident that I could solve them but couldn't do it in the heat of the moment.

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Q: Was this your first CAT attempt?

A: Yes, this was my first attempt. And in case if I don't get selected in IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta I'll accept my job offer at Ernst and young and prepare again for CAT 2020.

Q: When did you start preparing for CAT exam? What was your overall prep strategy?

A: I prepared for 2 months. Attended few lectures at Career Launcher, straightaway started with the mocks, and analyzed them. I gave 14 mocks in total and spent 1 whole day for each of DILR and Quant and the rest 59 days for VARC. Further, for DILR I went through all the sets in all the mocks, which I have given and solved them again with an additional task of identifying their difficulty. For Quant, I referred Crack U’s revision videos, which were 3 hours long in total. For VARC, I got myself enrolled for the special VARC1000 videos by Gejo sir of Career Launcher and this boosted my percentile from 85 to 99 in the mocks. I even watched online video playlist on RC by Takshzila, which were very helpful.

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Q: Please share with us your section- wise strategy.

A: VARC: complete passages under 40 minutes and thereafter move on to attempt odd one out, para summary, para jumble in order. Passages were my strength and I managed to get 22/24 correct. Here my strategy was "always look to eliminate because you have 3/4 probability of a wrong answer"

DILR: scan the whole paper, choose sets in the order of increasing difficulty and attempt at least seven of them. In final exam, in order to attempt all the eight, I started solving them in order and I could not solve the first one under 8 minutes so I went back to my old strategy and I managed to crack only six.

Quant: raw speed and quick calculations but you can achieve this if and only if you are conceptually thorough with all the concepts.

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Q: Which books did you refer to for CAT preparation?

A: I did not specifically refer to any book. However, Arun Sharma’s book for VARC and official guide for GMAT came in handy.

Also Read: CAT Preparation Strategy