CAT Preparation@ Audit your ability & decide on strategy for CAT: Arun Sharma

Aug. 28, 2012 - PRLog -- Arun Sharma, a CAT guru and author of CAT preparation books published from Tata McGrawHill, shares the things that need to be done in the interim.
With the countdown to the CAT 2012 examination reaching its final few weeks, one needs to ensure that their preparations take a final shape during these last hours.

1. Ability audit: Know what you know and what you do not. Perhaps at this crucial hour, it should be one of the most important objectives of your preparation. My advice is to individually audit your solving skills in each of the question category of each area. While doing this, focus on how good your conceptual understanding is in each of the categories. Also, try to find out how your solving skills get affected under time and performance pressure.
Make sure that you do this ability audit on each question category across all sections. The ability audit break up should be based on the following dimensions:

Quantitative aptitude:

Block 1 (Number systems and progressions)
Block 2 (Averages and alligations)
Block 3 (Percentages, ratio and proportions, time and work, time, speed and distance)
Block 4 (Geometry and mensuration)
Block 5 (Functions, inequalities, logs and quadratic equations)
Block 6 (permutations and combinations, probability, set Theory)
Logical reasoning & data interpretation:
Break down the portion into various question types and evaluate your ability to solve each question type.

Verbal ability:

Break the portion into the following question categories:

i)    Antonyms, synonyms, word usage, idioms and phrasal verbs-based questions.
ii)    Sentence-level questions - fill in the blanks; facts inferences and judgements.
iii)    Paragraph-level questions – critical reasoning, paragraph jumbles, and close tests.
iv)    Passage-level questions – reading comprehension.

When doing this, the crucial question you need to ask yourself would be something like: “Given 100 questions in say Block 1 in quantitative aptitude, how many would you be able to solve?” If your answer is 90+, it means that you not only know that question type and portion well, but also have a strong belief in your ability to solve those questions. In such a case, you would not need to do much work for that part. The only suggestion I may give is to review and revise each question that you have solved during preparations.

75-90: This means that you have strong ability, but that has not got converted to a strong belief. Hence, the indications are that you might need to solve a few more questions and firm up your solving processes for the question type. Focus more on the possible errors your mind is prone to.

50-75: It obviously means that you are still not sure of the concepts and its applications, and hence, you need to maybe revisit the concepts as well as expose yourself to more questions in that category. Further, you would need to also review and revise all questions that you have solved so that you are able to execute at least what you know under the pressure of the exam.

Below 50: Re-visit the concepts, study the chapter again, resolve the initial set of questions once again, and expose yourself to more questions in order to improve your reactions. In case, you are not able to reach at least 60-70+, you might as well forget being able to do the particular question category during the exam.

2. Test taking strategies


I)    Time management during the exam: Look at your behaviour pattern and state of mind during the start, the middle and the end of each section of the exam. Focus on keeping a stable mind throughout the test. Also, ensure that you never fall behind what can be called as ‘the asking rate’ inside the exam. What I mean to say is that if you plan to solve 23 questions in 70 minutes in one section, it translates to a question every three minutes. So at the end of 15 minutes you should have solved a minimum of five questions (ideally more so that the pressure on you is off.)

II)    Removal of errors: Categorize the errors you make in a test into level 1 (errors you made due to just one error while solving the question), level 2 (two errors in your thought) or level 3+ errors (more than three errors in your thought within the question). Needless to say, level 1 error would be the easiest to overcome and hence offer the easiest way to improve your scores rapidly.