CAT Toppers Interview@ Topper Mantras: CAT 2011 99.93 percentiler Mohit Srivastava

Aug. 1, 2012 - PRLog -- Mohit Srivastava secured a high score of 99.93 percentile in CAT 2011 and has converted the call of IIM Bangalore.

A Varanasi boy, who lived in several places in India courtesy his IAS officer father’s job, Mohit did his Computer Science Engineering from IIIT Hyderabad and worked for about two years in Amazon Hyderabad as a Software Development Engineer.


Q: How did you start the preparation and what was your overall strategy?

A: I started a bit late and due to my ill health I could not prepare properly till October. As soon as I joined a mock CAT test series and started giving mock tests. For me the key to cracking CAT 2011 was taking a lot of mocks and analyzing them thoroughly. Analyzing mocks can be tricky because there is a right way and a wrong way to do the same. The wrong way for instance would be you doing some mistakes in some vocab question and you going back to Barron’s Word List to increase your vocabulary (Realize that this strategy can really bomb because CAT doesn’t really test how many words you know, it rather tests your understanding of English and your logical comprehension).


Q: Do you think it is possible to crack CAT without taking formal coaching? What would you suggest the CAT 2012 aspirants who would like to prepare by themselves?

A: Yes it is definitely possible to crack CAT 2012 without a formal coaching. One thing however I would recommend for sure is that you must and must join a national level mock test series.
Q: CAT saw a major change in the format & pattern in 2011. How did you prepare for it? Did this new pattern cause any hindrance in your preparation or exam taking strategy?

A: One advantage CAT 2011 provided me was that I was earlier spending less than 40 minutes time on English (when the sections were open) and was trying to use up that time to maximize my score in QA and DI. Since CAT 2011 had a restriction on spending a fixed amount of time on VA and LR I actually was able to spend more time on my VA section which helped me improve my accuracy in VA.
Q: What was your preparation strategy for the Quantitative Ability & Data Interpretation and Verbal Ability & Logical Reasoning?

A: My strategy in QA and DI was to pick and attack the QA questions first since this was my forte. The ideal mix of time for me was to give somewhere around 40 to 45 minutes for QA and some 25 to 30 minutes for DI.
For DI my preparation mostly revolved around getting a sense of familiarity with most data sets and some common caselets.

LR again was more of getting used to the various types of caselets and questions and getting used to them. LR was trickier in the sense that time had to be managed more smartly. I made sure that I wasn’t getting stuck on a question for more than four minutes of my time.

VA was the toughest part for me. I had to do a lot to improve my VA. First and the foremost I had to work on improving my reading and comprehension speed which included a lot of stuff including getting the tone of the author and un-weaving close set of options. Then I had to work a lot on parajumbles and also inference based questions. Mostly it was practise and practise.

Q: What was your strategy for time management?

A: My strategy for time management was simple. Attack all the questions that were easy (irrespective of the fact that they were from my strength or not). You should not focus too much on a question if it takes more than two minutes to solve and trust your ability that if it takes more than two minutes for you to solve it is difficult for almost 90 per cent of the CAT takers.