In the first part of the post on to how to prepare for CAT , we discussed what your practice routines should be like. In this part, we look at how you should approach your practice, how you can get most out of your practice sessions and how you can maximize your potential in fewer iterations.

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Your practice should be both quantitative and qualitative

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In the previous post we discussed the milestones you need to reach in terms of numbers before various dates. But does that mean that you start today and just keep churning out the numbers?

What happens between practice sessions? Especially, right at the beginning of your prep. Do you pause to reflect on how well you have executed a practice session?

• Did you solve that DI set cleanly without any wasted steps?
• Could you have cut down on calculating precisely and instead approximated?
• Are you, as a process, always looking to exploit the gap between answer options?
• Are you reading the logic of the RC answer option or are you just matching words and phrases?
• Do you tend to re-start LR sets after realizing mid-way that you were barking up the wrong tree in your first representation of the data?

Very often test-takers don’t approach their practice with such a mindset, aspirants almost end up doing the same thing over and over again without giving too much thought to their practice sessions.

If you want to improve from session to session you need to relfect between sessions and before you start your next session you need to tell yourself the things you are going to correct.

This is the best way to ensure that you are maximizing your ability in minimum iterations.

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Starting your prep with a clean slate and doing it the right way

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Practice is only execution but before practice lies the centre or core from which the way you learn stems, the way you perceive you ability stems. You need to first ensure that this core is based on the right principles.

Two things that all test-takers should take to heart are

• that it does not matter what your history with Math, DI, LR or RC is what you did so far has no bearing on how you will do on the CAT
• that it is not a matter of talent but a matter of maximizing your potential

So before you start your prep in all earnest you will do well to go through these two posts so that you make the most of your practice:

CAT Preparation: Changing The Default Settings

CAT Preparation: The Natural Talent Myth