Latest Posts

How tough was the DI-LR on CAT 2017 Slot 1 ?

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After doing two posts on Slot 2 of CAT 2017, I kind of felt in the groove to take a shot at Slot 1 as well. Was it really that tough? If one of my best friends and a beast far as cracking the CAT  is concerned did not attempt all questions as is usually the case — how many can a test-taker currently scoring around 90 percentile in the SimCATs realistically attempt? How should he or she have gone about analyzing the section, in what order should the sets have been attempted? I thought I will take up these questions in this blog post so that many fears can be laid to rest. Read More

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How to crack the DI-LR section of the CAT – I

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Just like I keep getting queries on how to increase RC accuracy, despite the Last Mile To CAT sessions, I keep getting queries around the DI-LR section as well.

Given the great response that the RC posts got, I thought I’ll dive really deep down into the DI-LR sets of CAT 2017 and see if I can come up with some kernel of truth beyond just the solving of the set that can help aspirants approach the solving of the sets better. Read More

How to increase your accuracy on RC – 1

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So much of a weight does RC have on the CAT, so many are the difficulties faced by test-takers and so frequent are the queries that I receive about RC, despite the previous post and the Last Mile To CAT sessions, that I thought that it will be best to devote a series of posts to cracking Reading Comprehension. So before we dive in, I suggest that you read the previous post that outlines how to choose which RCs to solve.

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How to increase your VA accuracy on the CAT

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One thing that has always bothered me a lot whenever I interact with students, is that they seem to be very reluctant to let go of their playing-the-percentages attitude to tests. Throughout school and college, we tend to study by playing the percentages — giving importance to topics as per the number of questions that appear from that topic in the exam. While this might be a great strategy for school and college exams, as far as aptitude tests go, this strategy is suicidal purely because of the fact that the difficulty level and the number of questions across areas do not follow a fixed pattern.

How is this related to Verbal Ability in the current pattern of the CAT? Read More

CAT 2018: How to manage work and prepare for the CAT

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With the mountain called the CAT now in sight, most working professionals will be wondering how to mount another challenge to get into the old IIMs.

The biggest obstacle in front working professionals will be juggling a job and prepping for CAT at the same time. Some of you in this situation will have decided to quit your job, hopefully only after having read my post on the same and having understood the implications of quitting.
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How to increase your accuracy on the Verbal Ability section

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The Verbal Ability section of the CAT has always been one of those things that never fails gets my goat. To me it has never made any sense at all! Why do they want MBA aspirants to

  • read passages by philosophers (and sometimes poets) and then answer questions set by non-philosophers or people who fancy themselves to be philosophers
  • know at least three idioms in which the word “DONKEY” is used correctly and one in which it is incorrectly used — the one I marked as incorrect was — The Professor could talk the hind legs off a donkey — of course only a professor capable of that could make that question!
  • keep unjumbling paragraphs when there can always be more than one way of arranging sentences to form a coherent paragraph.

This is one of the big reasons why I like and respect the precisely designed Verbal Section of the GMAT and also teach a lot for the same!

But be that as it may, we have a job at hand — to clear the Verbal Cut-off consistently.

In this post, I shall outline a strategy to improve your selection, accuracy and most importantly consistency in the Verbal Section. Read More