Students’ Speak: Follow these Tips & Tricks to crack CAT exam

CAT 2019 is round the corner, to be conducted on November 24, these quick tips and tricks suggested by Roychowdhury can be helpful for you.

• First of all, you need to know about the exam pattern of the CAT exam. Go through the Shiksha website and search for the CAT syllabus where you will get an overview of what is there with chapter-wise.
• After the syllabus, you need to know the exam pattern. There are three sections: Quantitative Aptitude (QA), Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning (DILR) and Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC). There is a total of 100 questions and the total duration of the exam is three hours. You will get one hour for each section. In QA there are 34 questions, for LRDI 32 questions and for VARC 34 questions. Each question will carry three marks and -1 for every wrong answer.
• There will be two slots like every year in the CAT exam. Both slot questions will be different. But a normalised rule is applied by the organising authority so that clarity is maintained for all the applicants.
• Time allotment is the most important part while attempting the exam. In the first 10 minutes, you should scan the total exam paper so that you can get an overall idea about the difficulty level of the questions and you can also decide questions that you can attempt easily. In the next 50 minutes, you can do VA, but not more than one hour. In the next hour, you can attempt DILR or QA and so on. For better results on time management, I would suggest not to stick to one question. It’s always better to move forward and use the option mark and save so that you can review those questions in a later stage. By this method, you will at least try to look at the whole question paper. Because in many cases student left a few easy questions due to bad time management. These things can be avoided.
• From day one, you should look for the right guidance. You can enroll yourself and take study material from any coaching institutes. There are already many coaching institutes for CAT. You can refer to any of these according to rating.
• After solving study materials, the most important part is to sit for mocks from day one. You should give at least one mock within 15 days. This will help you to perform better on the exam day. Not only this, you can get to know about your strong and weak areas so that you can work on your improvement. Sometimes student thinks that they are good in any particular areas, but after analysing the mocks it is seen that the result is different. So, the analysis of mocks needs to be done individually. Generally, an analysis of a mock would take around three hours. Try to follow this and definitely you will get a better result. All the best for your preparation.

About the Author:

Soumyadip Roychowdhury is a student at Symbiosis Institute of International Business (SIIB) studying Master in Business Administration with a specialisation in International Business (MBA-IB). He is a second-year student and has interned with brands such as Adani Wilmar and HealthScion. He is also a committee member of the Entrepreneurship Cell at SIIB.