test blogger

I basically wanted to test my potential and figure out whether I stand a realistic chance of getting into a top B school in the near future. I decided to put in around 5-6 months of moderate to intense self study. However I did not join any institute nor did I take any Mock CAT’s. Thus when I went to give the CAT, I had really no idea where I would stand. However, to my surprise I ended up scoring around 95.4 % ile.It was then that I decided that I would surely put in a much more dedicated effort to get into a good B school at a later date.

I did not appear for CAT the next year (2005), partly because I had started working and was still within the bond period and also because I thought it would be better to get a couple of years work ex before joining a B school. Finally, I decided to appear for CAT 2006. I started my preparation in January which gave me around 9-10 months of time before the D day.

The amount of time I devoted for each section was based on my level of comfort in that particular area. My strongest area was verbal on which I spent the least amount of time preparing. This was because, fortunately, I had developed a reading habit very early in my school days and used to read extensively. I realized that this alone was quite sufficient to crack the verbal section and not much extra preparation was required.

Coming to Quants, this was the section on which I spent the maximum amount of time preparing. I was reasonably good at Quants and since I had already prepared for the CAT once, my fundamentals were quite strong. So this time around, I mainly focused on solving advanced problems to further hone my Quant skills. However this is where I faced a problem. I could not find enough good books/material which had the kind of advanced problems that you usually find in CAT. Ultimately I figured out two sources which I thought offered the best practice material as far as Quants were concerned – one was previous years mock CAT papers and the second , Internet.Mock CAT papers of most top institutes contain high quality problems which are modeled closely along the lines of a typical CAT paper.I tried to obtain as many mock cat papers as possible and started working on its quant sections.Internet was another major source for finding high quality quant problems.(There are national & regional high school level mathematical competitions held in many countries which have some really good quant problems similar to the ones you see in CAT. Specifically, I found the American Mathematical Competition (AMC-12) to be especially good, which had problems in increasing levels of complexity, ranging from the very simple to some really good ones. A little googling, and you can get the past papers of these competitions. For eg. Check out the 2001 AMC12: http://www.math.uncc.edu/~hbreiter/AHSME/amc12st.pdf)

DI section was the trickiest one for me. I was not very good at DI and was not really sure how to go about preparing for it. The pattern of DI had changed considerably over the years. Initially the problems were mainly based on graphs with high degree of number crunching involved which had changed to more logic based, less calculation intensive problems. There was no dearth of practice problems for the former kind of DI problems though I found very little practice material for the latter kind. Finally, I had to resort to past Mock CAT papers from different institutes to prepare for the same.

Other Details: On an average, I used to practice for around 2 hrs daily. I had also joined TIME weekend coaching classes but ended up bunking most of them. Somehow, attending classes have never been my forte. However, I found their Mock CAT’s to be incredibly useful and religiously attended almost all of them. Since a good majority of serious aspirants appear for their Mock CAT’s you get a very good indication of your progress, based on which you can plan your future strategies. As far as preparation for XAT was concerned, as I already mentioned, I did not specifically prepare for it. One major difference in XAT paper was the essay section, which I did not prepare for at all. In hindsight, I realize it would have been beneficial if I had devoted at least some time in practicing essay writing, since I was completely out of touch and struggled to write my XAT essay. However as they say, all is well that ends well. I ended up with 99.15 percentile

(Disclaimer: The above account simply describes how I went about my preparation. Every person is unique with different strengths & weaknesses, and what works for one might not work for someone else. Also, I have described in detail only my “second attempt”, which could be very different from your first attempt in terms of the level and kind of preparation required. All the best!!)