Students’ Speak: Things to keep in mind for MAT preparation

By: Abhishek Desai

Abhishek says that aspirants should have a thorough understanding of all the important formulas, calculation tricks and shortcuts during the last couple of days and should not try to study a new concept.

Management Aptitude Test (MAT) is one of the prime entrance for students planning to study Master in Business Administration. This entrance requires you to be well-versed with the topics and the type of questions asked. Here is a set of advice that you must keep in mind in the last few days of your preparation:

• My advice for MAT aspirants would be to have a thorough understanding of all the important formulas, calculation tricks and shortcuts during the last couple of days. Do not try to study a new concept at this juncture; rather focus well on whatever you have covered before.
• In the next 30 days, solve a total of about ten mocks and analyse them thoroughly to eliminate all possible errors, if any. Also, make a note of such mistakes to avoid losing both marks as well as morale on February 16. Watch the videos and articles on the Internet of the previous MAT toppers, and know-how they leveraged their time and resources, and which strategy they used to score well.
• I also advise aspirants to unwind themselves on February 15 by indulging in meditation which would both calm their nerves as well as refresh them on the exam day.
• There would be pretty high chances of a student unable to solve the questions or encountering doable but time-consuming questions. In the latter scenario, ensure not to spend too much time on a particular question no matter what to get a great score in the exam. Answer those questions first which you are confident the most about.
• Section-wise MAT Preparation Strategy
  • Language Comprehension: The simple tip to score well here is to read newspapers regularly, and also watch English movies/web series/TV shows to get a good command over the language. Out of the 40 questions, about ten are usually based on vocabulary whereas the others are based on comprehension passages, jumbled paragraphs and core grammar usage.
  • Maths: Here, one has to be pretty sound in the basic concepts and formulas. Use shortcuts, if applicable, to the questions to save time. Increase the number of solving the problems by setting a stopwatch to increase your speed. If you are stuck in the middle while solving the problems, just move on to the next question without wasting time. Try to practice topics related to ratios, SI and CI, profit and loss, problems on ages, etc.
  • Data Analysis and Sufficiency: Solve different types of questions related to data analysis such as pie chart, line graph, bar graph, etc. Solve previous years’ papers to increase your speed and to get an idea on the various types of questions as well their difficulty level.
  • Intelligence and Critical Reasoning: Here, solve the problems by applying shortcut tricks and methods wherever applicable. The time allocated for this section is 30 minutes so be quick and smart to attempt the questions.
  • Indian and Global Environment: To ace here, take the help of YouTube and Internet articles which have a collection of such news articles over the past 3-6 months. Focus more on topics related to the Indian government, business, politics, global updates, and sports.

Always remember that a cool mind will any day perform much better than a stressed mind.

About the Author:

Abhishek Desai is currently pursuing Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) in e-Business from Welingkar Institute of Management. He has done his Summer Internship in the field of Market Research with 'TimesofMoney'. He's also served as 'Secretary of the Green Committee' at Welingkar.