A few years back, I attended the Chennai convocation function for aspirants who cleared the Company Secretary (CS) exam (a relative of mine had cleared the exam). The Chief Guest was Padmishri awardee T.N.Manoharan, who is a pre-eminent figure in the Banking and Accounting sector in the country with his book being a must-read for all CA aspirants. He was part of the government-appointed team that cleaned up the Satyam mess and paved the way for the transition to Tech Mahindra. His keynote address was leavened with wisdom and had too many punchlines for me to recount here but one of the things he said is spot on when it comes to the way we should deal with success and failure. He said…
celebrate success with all your heart but do not let it get to your head and do not let failure enter and break your heart, use your head to find out the causes and deal with it
The first two SimCATs are done and I am regularly meeting students to help them navigate their prep, especially the mental aspect of handling these initial results, which can seem pretty rough. Aspirants usually start off full-steam, thinking 99 percentile — IIM-A — and then when faced with these initial disappointments tend to lose heart and start going through a phase of self-doubt.
This post is about how you should use your head to deal with phase.
Setting the right attempt, accuracy and score targets
In my previous post I had mentioned that you would need to be patient and wait till around the end of September to you see your best scores and percentiles. But how do you set mini-targets till then to ensure that by the time you are about a month away from CAT, you are performing at your peak?
The devil, as they say, is always in the details. Let us look at the overall scores at different percentile levels for SimCATs 1 and 2.
- 99 percentile – 141, 143
- 95 percentile – 111, 118
- 90 percentile – 94, 103
- 80 percentile – 75, 83
- 70 percentile – 60, 69
Those of you who have a percentile below 70 and are feeling bad about same, try viewing what 70 percentile means from a different lens.
On average around 75 marks should fetch you 75 percentile and ideally, these 75 marks should get spread equally across the three sections.
What do 25 marks in a section mean?
- Approximately 12-13 attempts with 9-10 questions correct.
So, on average to get a 70 percentile you will be leaving more questions than you will be attempting or in other words, you will be attempting very judiciously.
A reasonably reliable estimate of how many questions you should be attempting in each section on the SimCATs to scale different percentile levels is given in the table below.
- 80 percentile – 10/13
- 85 percentile – 13/16
- 90 percentile – 16/20
- 95 percentile – 18/22
- 99 percentile – 20/25
If you speak to previous years’ CAT-takers they might say that these numbers are on the slightly lower side but SimCATs have always been tougher than the actual CAT. If the actual CAT is easier your attempts and accuracy have to naturally go up.
Setting the right percentile targets over the next three months
I know that the readers of this blog will be a varied lot — from re-takers who are already at a 95 percentile to first-timers who fared poorly in their initial SimCATs. The percentile targets I am going to suggest are strictly for those who are currently at or below 80 percentile irrespective of whether they are re-takers or not. Given below are the percentiles you should target to reach in the coming months. Please note that you need to touch these percentiles sometime during these months, not necessarily at the beginning or the end.
- 85 percentile – July
- 90 percentile – August
- 95 percentile – September
So in these initial SimCATs, you should set modest milestones to start with in terms of attempts accuracy and percentiles and slowly work your way up the ladder.
One rule of thumb can be to aim at increasing your percentile by 3-5 points every month from now on.
Learn to leave the right balls before you are ready to despatch every ball to the fence
One of the big psychological barriers when it comes to test-taking is not very different from what batsmen face when they come to the crease — the eagerness to get off the mark.
So right from the start of a section, test-takers are always desperate to somehow score and get some marks under the belt. Given this desperation what do they do?
Like batsmen who tend to play at every ball, test-takers tend to attempt every question. What happens when batsmen tend to do that at the beginning of an innings, they tend to get out caught in the slips, usually playing away from their body.
So like it is in cricket, the key in test-taking is also shot selection or rather choosing which questions to take a shot at. I know this is easier said than done.
Protect your time spent, the way you are supposed to protect your wicket
In cricket, they say that the best batsmen place a premium on their wicket. If you remember the big problem with Rohit Sharma at the beginning of this career was his inconsistency and most of it was because of the manner of his dismissals. He would more or less gift his wicket away. This was true of many great players at the beginning of their careers, it was more likely to be true of the more talented players. Aravinda D’Silva had more than one shot that he could play to a particular ball! This meant that in the early stages of his career he would throw his wicket away to a wrong choice of shot. The Aravinda who destroyed India in the 1996 semi-final was a fully in control of his shot-selection.
As test-takers what you need to learn to do is to place a premium on your time. When you attempt a question you should be getting three marks for it more than 8 out of 10 times, the rest of the questions should be left alone. Most of the time you will find that a lot of your time was spent on questions that gave you no return.
Now, later or never
When you read a question or a set, you should be wearing the CEO hat and take a decision — should I do this question NOW, LATER or NEVER!
Given the amount of practice all of you would have so far, this choice is not going to be an easy one.
The more questions you have solved, the better your ability will be to gauge the level of a question and classify it for NOW, LATER or NEVER.
This is most true in the case of the DI-LR. In the case of the Verbal section people attempt as many questions as they can, based on their reading speed — if they have read a question, they take a shot at it.
In the case of Quant depending on whether they have covered that concept and also the length of the question, test-takers make a choice whether to solve or leave. Those who have covered all questions on the Quant and are good at it, face a different problem — every question will seem solvable.
In the next three posts, I will take up each section and outline a question selection strategy for the same based on the old SimCATs.
In the meantime set the right targets and approach your 180 minutes in a way that you reach those targets.
The CAT Writer 
sir,please write the next article that you mentioned
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awsm….
my scores was
simcat 1— 52
simcat 2—–11
simcat 3—–0
what i do.???
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Sir when are you writing the next article?
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This week 🙂
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Whatever I have tried, I couldn’t improve my score in QUANT above 30. A little insight might be helpful.
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Will do a post on the same this week.
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Hi Sir, Need some guidance regarding my profile, my current work ex and CAT Prep. How should we reach you for the same?
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Hi Garima,
You can drop your profile-related query here as a comment.
For prep you can go through all the blog posts, since over the course of all the blogs most of the queries will be cleared.
If you have a doubt after that as well, then you can drop in a comment.
All the best!
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This is really helpful.
Though I am reading this now after SIMCAT 6, I am more or less on this path only.
I managed to score a 86%ile in SIMCAT 5 and will try to reach 90+ in August.
Do post more of such strategic approaches, they help a lot.
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I am weak in di and lr section.. How can i improve it.. Just 3 month remains 😣
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Hi Saurabh,
Please look at the old posts on how to improve your DI-LR percentile, they should help.
All the best!
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Sir, i will be attempting cat for the 2nd time, i got 91 percentile the first time. In the two SIMCATs , i have got 97 and 91 percentile, though i have started my revision just a month ago. My concepts are clear in Quant. How many hours should i spend everyday in studies to get to the 99 percentile mark(i am doing job as well).
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Hi Saqib,
It is not necessarily about how many hours you need to study. As a prospective business leader, you need to think through the lens of what do you need to improve and how much time that will take.
Please go through the specific posts on this blog related to How to increase QA, VA & DI-LR percentiles to figure out what you need to on each of the sections to take your percentile to the next level.
All the best!
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Hello Sir,
I have read all your blogs on how to improve the Verbal Ability but I’m still scoring quite low (around 75-80 %ile) in VA & RC. My other two sections are comparatively quite good, QA(95 %ile) and DI-LR (90 %ile). I have taken up reading newspapers and novels as well since the past 2-3 months, but my scores aren’t improving. Please help.
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exact same story with me and I have given mocks of cl,times ,ims and mbaguru with the pattern almost same …even the overall percentile also remains between 95-97…..This is where the problem is my english …
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Hi Mukesh,
You need to be on top of three things to reach higher percentile ranges on VA — Reading Speed, Comprehension & Question-specific strategy.
Mostly, students struggle with all three but are only able to figure out a problem with Reading Speed.
I think the first thing one should fix is a question-specific solving strategy outlined in the VA specific blog posts.
Do you solve summary questions by identifying the three points that the right summary should have?
Do you identify the out of context sentence by giving a label to each of the sentences?
Do you read RCs one para at a time and then answer questions pertaining to that para?
More often than not test-takers read the blog but go back to solving it through gut-feel.
You can attend the Last Mile To CAT session that we will be conducting across the country over the next few weeks to get a precise demonstration of the strategies.
You would by now know that as far as increasing reading speed and comprehension goes, I will be lying if I say that I have a quick fix. Both of these skills are developed over time.
Hope this clarifies,
All the best!
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Hi Himanshu,
You need to be on top of three things to reach higher percentile ranges on VA — Reading Speed, Comprehension & Question-specific strategy.
Mostly, students struggle with all three but are only able to figure out a problem with Reading Speed.
I think the first thing one should fix is a question-specific solving strategy outlined in the VA specific blog posts.
Do you solve summary questions by identifying the three points that the right summary should have?
Do you identify the out of context sentence by giving a label to each of the sentences?
Do you read RCs one para at a time and then answer questions pertaining to that para?
More often than not test-takers read the blog but go back to solving it through gut-feel.
You can attend the Last Mile To CAT session that we will be conducting across the country over the next few weeks to get a precise demonstration of the strategies.
You would by now know that as far as increasing reading speed and comprehension goes, I will be lying if I say that I have a quick fix. Both of these skills are developed over time.
Hope this clarifies,
All the best!
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Hi Sir,
Thank you for your valued inputs.
I had read about the various strategies on your posts and have started implementing the same quite lately.
Hopefully I’ll get used to it over a period of time and my percentiles improve.
See you at the Last mile to CAT in Mumbai 🙂
Thanks,
Himanshu
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Sir I have 62 percent in my 10th and 12th am I eligible for the IIM Ahmedabad ,Bangalore, calcutta,Kozhikode, Lucknow
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Hi Rahul,
You are eligible but since your marks are low chances are really slim since whereas others will get high marks for academics, you will barely score any.
I suggest focus on other schools and just getting the best CAT score you can.
All the best!
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hello.
sir i am mechanical engg. student and graduate from sinhgad college with placement in accenture but now am planning for my MBA (in operation/marketing).i want to know is there any value for brand of company(if i ‘ll have experience in accenture which is a leading IT firm, being a mech student,will that affect my profile?)
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