All posts filed under: CAT Strat

A prep plan for the last leg of CAT

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I was pleasantly surprised when a few days back I started receiving a similar query, both in mails from across the country and from the students I was meeting in person — what do I do in the last 45 days, I need a plan for the last 45 days.It is not surprising since approaching deadlines have a strange effect on our psyche and round figures such as 45 have a strange way of both spurring and postponing action (if the time is 9:45, most people postpone stuff they have to do till 10). I have always felt that our need insatiable need to find meaning in entropy leads us to irrationally seek comfort in rational numbers such as 45 — why not a 47-day prep plan, at least 47 is a prime number!

To re-take or not to re-take the CAT

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At this juncture, it doesn’t take a magician to see what kind of anxieties aspirants might be going through. A small fraction of you have got the calls you want and are all excited and nervous about the impending interviews or the results of the same, others have  GD-PI calls but are not sure whether the b-schools that have given them the calls are really worth it, and still others knowing that this year is done have hit snooze mode till June. This post will primarily deal with the dilemma of those in between — to re-take or not to re-take the CAT. It is not an easy call to take but your task will become easy if you ask yourself the right questions and give the most honest answers you can to them.

CAT 2016: The best online CAT so far

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Now that the dust has begun to settle on CAT 2016, we can may be take a step back — beyond score calculators, the expected percentiles and incorrect questions — and take a look at it in terms of the evolution of the test. The test itself, if I am not wrong, for only the third time in its history did not change at all in terms of structure. On the face of it CAT 2016 and 2015 look like twins but like with twins there are significant differences beneath the surface.

How to take your SimCAT scores to the next level

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We have just finished SimCAT 9 and if the scores & percentile charts are any indication, test-takers are beginning to find their footing. But here is the catch — for every set of people hitting the 100s for the first time, there will be a set hitting 120s, a set hitting 135s and a set hitting 150s as well for the first time. So some of you while feeling happy to see high scores will also be feeling a bit of a bother when you see your percentiles. Well firstly, the happiness is warranted so don’t let the percentiles bog you down. What you need to now do is to see your scores, percentiles and the task ahead in the next 60 days in the right perspective.

Where can I get tough CAT questions to practice?

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This is a question that we get asked frequently, more so this year given last year’s tough DI-LR section. One place where you can get more SimCAT-level questions whose level of difficulty is quantified is in a book called CAT 500. This is a book that we publish every year with new questions across all areas and classifed topic-wise. The USP of this book is that the questions are selected based on actual SimCAT data.

How many SimCATs should I take to score a 99 percentile on the CAT?

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Now that the notification is out and the CAT is out of the bag, a lot of test-takers have begun their preparation in all earnestness. It is a huge relief to know that the pattern is going to remain the same. For test-takers taking the CAT for the first or second time it might not seem like a big deal but for those such as yours truly it is in fact a really big deal. If I am not wrong this is only the second or third time that the CAT pattern has remained absolutely unchanged (the two or three times being since the test went computer-based in 2009). One of the reasons for me taking the CAT every year has been the novelty factor — what’s new this time, what new question types have they come up with, how does the relative difficulty level of this year compare with the previous one etc. Now that test-takers have gone into the serious-prep mode, the big question that I get asked or not asked is — …