Month: August 2021

How to select the right DI-LR sets

Published by Tony Xavier

After the previous posts, a few of you had commented saying that you are eagerly awaiting the post on the DI-LR section. The earnestness is understandable since most of you who are facing the SimCATs will know that the DI-LR section is one that will make or break your CAT.If it goes well, you will take that confidence into the QA section finish strong. If your performance on the DI-LR section goes south then you will start feeling the fatigue and will fade away in the last section. The latter has been the case with most test-takers over the years.

How to increase your VA accuracy on the CAT

Published by Tony Xavier

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?

Why your actual abilities might not be as good as you think they are

Published by Tony Xavier

The purpose of this site has been to examine the problems that students keep bringing back to me over the years, and as the important ones get addressed I keep getting other questions that depending on how one looks at it are either simple or hide more than they reveal to the casual observer. One such conundrum is this one, a paraphrase of a problem that I have answered in many comments: I do not know what happens to me during the test — I do pathetically, sometimes I am even ashamed to mention how much I score — but when I sit after the test, I find that I can answer all questions easily. How do I deal with this nervousness, how do I tackle this? You are looking in the wrong mirror — your post-test performance does not really count The biggest thing test-takers discount is that they are solving the whole paper for the second time! You have already spent 40 or 60 minutes with the 25 to 35 problems. You have …

How to increase your accuracy on RC – 3

Published by Tony Xavier

In the previous two posts, RC-1 and RC-2, we discussed 3 RCs from CAT 2017 Slot – 2 and executed a specific strategy — paragraph to questions — to solve CAT RCs that will increase your accuracy. In this final post of this series, we will solve the two remaining passages and fine-tune the methods discussed so far.

How to increase your accuracy on RC – 2

Published by Tony Xavier

In the previous post, we discussed a strategy to approach RCs and solved an actual passage from CAT 2017 Slot 2. In this post, we will take up a few more passages from the same slot and execute the strategy.

How to increase your accuracy on RC – 1

Published by Tony Xavier

So much 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, that I thought that it will be best to devote a series of posts to cracking Reading Comprehension.