Students’ Speak: Take failure in your stride and prepare for next attempt

CAT exam is among the toughest entrance exams on the planet and the competition is literally cut-throat. Kabila Visalakshi points out the importance of accepting failures, understanding your mistakes and preparing for subsequent attempts.

The first step towards dealing with failures is accepting that we have failed (accepting Failures), be it CAT or some other examination. It does hurt a lot but pain makes a person strong. Accepting your failures will be less painful rather than ignoring your feelings, as it will pop-up your emotions at unexpected times later on and can even make you feel depressed.

I always believe in Thomas Edison’s statement, “Tomorrow is my exam, but I don’t care because a single sheet of paper can’t decide my future.” Everyone who has achieved something in life would have failed at least once. Just remember, Edison failed a whopping 999 times before inventing the light bulb. Always learn from your failures, figure out your weak points from CAT 2019 exam and make sure to address them.

Prepare a corrective action plan so that you can do better next time and also if possible take time to think about what can be done differently before the next attempt. Move on from your failures and start working on your plan right away, it need not be perfect as you can do the course correction (in case needed) at a later stage. Be open in asking help and get support from your fellow aspirants, as that would be mutually beneficial. Just remember Albus Dumbledore's statement in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secret, “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask.”

Shortlisting MBA Colleges after CAT exam

Well, you managed to score a good percentile in CAT. So what next? Finding out the right college for yourself of course.

One way is to look at how the college is placed in the rankings is through the information from the ranking agencies (NIRF, Outlook, Business Today, etc.). Moreover, it is better to understand the research methodology behind the rankings, whether it is based on facts (information supplied by the university/college) or on perception (opinion from alumni, employer, academics, etc.).

I personally prefer colleges with a better score on Teaching, Learning and Resources, and Perception parameters. Some factors that should also be considered while shortlisting a college are ‘Value for Money’ (average alumni salary after three years divided by MBA’s total cost), employability and return on investment. Other important factors could be career progression, salary increase (average difference in alumni salary from before the MBA and now, entrepreneurship and alumni outcomes, thought leadership (academic reputation, faculty with PhD and research impact) and diversity (both gender and cultural mix).

How do we increase our score in CAT?

There are two ways to increase your score is either solve more questions or to improve the percentage of the right answers in the answered questions.

• First figure out the section, in which you are vulnerable (Verbal, Non – verbal, Quants or Spatial).
• Rather than working on that section blindly, work on your area of weakness in that specific section and try to improve in those areas.
• Practice as much as possible before leading up to the exam, as this will reduce the time taken to solve a question.
• It is not only important to solve more questions, but also to solve it correctly (avoid making silly calculation mistakes, usually happens with time pressure).
• Use your brain to solve complex mathematical calculations (use approximations, simplify before multiplying and practice daily) as this will help save a lot of time.
• Read various high-quality articles from the newspapers, as this will increase your vocabulary and will also get your timing down in the comprehension questions.

Prepare different tactics for each question types, as tactics combined with practice becomes a potent weapon to improve your CAT score.

About the Author:

Kabila is an engineering graduate, pursuing her MBA from Thiagarajar School of Management. Albeit with a work experience of 2 years in her profession, she has always been passionate about being a Tamil orator and has presented various fiery speeches in Media, Institutions and Election campaigns.