Know your ability and Don’t waste time (CAT PREPARATION)

Cat strategy

Improve your ability to select what you know and leave what you do not.

In the context of an examination where the required scores for 99 percentile would be 60–70% attempts with 100% accuracy,it is easy to see that perfect knowledge is perhaps not needed in order to crack CAT. Hence, even if you have around 60-70%knowledge of the questions in an average test, you are perhaps good enough to crack the exam. A good way to test whether you have sufficient knowledge would be to pick up 10–20 test papers and divide your QA section into blocks of five questions each. Then test your knowledge by looking at the average number of questions you know.

If on an average for every five QA test questions that you pick up, if you know more than three, then the prognosis would be that you have adequate knowledge for cracking CAT.

Thus, while you may want to move towards knowing 5 out of 5 in this context, there are other things that you should focus on-developing your ability to decide on whether you are going to be able to solve a question while reading it for the first time. This would help you stop fishing during the test.

Cat

Your mind should give you a clear indication of whether you would be able to do the last step in a question, before you start doing it. In that sense you should be able to clearly define three types of outcomes when you finish reading a question for the first time:

(a) I see a clear flowchart and the steps are manageable-Obviously you need to go on and solve these questions.

(b) I see a clear flowchart but the steps are too lengthy-In this case, you need to see where you stand in your test-time and attempt-wise.

(C) I do not see a clear flowchart but I can try as I see a starting point-

.this is potentially the most dangerous situation you in the duration of the test, as once you get sucked into a question, there is a strong tendency to lose track of the time you are using up while trying the question. My advice is that while taking the test, you should not even start doing such questions.

(d) I see no flowchart and no starting point to the question-Obviously you should leave such questions