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How to prepare for the XAT

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A curious phenomenon repeats itself year after year when the results of the CAT and the XAT come out – there is little overlap between the students who crack CAT and those who crack XAT. In other words, a largely different set of test-takers ends up cracking each test.

Why is this so? It is almost like one of the GMAT CR question types – which of the following provides the best explanation for the phenomenon described above? 

The answer(s) to this question will also hold the key to know how to prepare to ace the XAT! Read More

CAT 2019 Analysis: Same bottle, stronger wine

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The last time I took the CAT was in 2017 when I was heading IMS Pune (I had to go all the way to Nasik to take the test, and that was the reason I was fed up and did not take the test last year. This year I took the test yesterday in the afternoon slot at Pune, after two years of not teaching at all and the rustiness was more than visible.

The toughest Verbal section in a while

At an overall level, keeping the whole test-taking population in mind, the Verbal section was definitely one of the toughest in recent years. One of the big reasons for the toughness was the nature of the passages itself. Pound for pound, each of the passages was tougher to read than those of the preceding years. When students used to fret over the Verbal in the SimCATs, I used to feel that they will find the actual CAT easy, but this year in terms of the passages and the questions the CAT was as tough as the SimCATs.  One passage in each of the slots was tougher than those that appeared on the SimCATs as well. In a weird coincidence, both passages involved the British! On the way back with my colleagues, I was saying that angrez gaye, par CAT RC chod gaye.

The VA questions were all reasonably tricky as well, especially the odd man out and the summary questions, the answers could not be marked with a great conclusiveness, it was more of a case of elimination. The odd man out is anyway the weirdest question type since last year they declared parts of the actual paragraph in the sequence itself to be the odd one out!

Those who managed to 4 RCs well with not more than one error per passage and managed to confidently solve half of the VA questions can easily clear the cutoffs.

The cutoffs at the higher-end of the spectrum, 99 and above, will not go down by much since the previous years’ papers will not have challenged the people at that range enough, so test-takers at that level will have raised their game to match the level.

I personally had the same problem that I have had with this three-section format — 20 minutes left at the end of VA-RC after having solved all the questions (with a gun to my head I can solve the VA-RC section in 30 minutes) where I go back and comfortably relook at a few questions, but those were the ones that either do have a good option or ones where one has to choose the least offensive option. The 20 minutes could have been more than useful in the DI-LR section :-).

A more deceptive but equally tricky DI-LR section as the previous years

When I took 10 minutes and rated the sets, I thought that the section was way easier than last year. My first reaction was — my friend scrabbler will kill this and score around 280!

I did the two easiest sets in good time, the Spider set on revenues and profits and the Scatter Plot on rainfall, the questions were all closed questions as well. Looking at the sets, I knew that they were following the tradition of the last two years of giving complex looking representations that were, in essence, simple calculations. I think I was about 25 minutes into the section by the time I reached this stage. This was where a mixture of factors led to me not spending the rest of the section optimally.

Instead of picking the next most do-able set, since I was feeling good, I chose the languages set since the content was straightforward and most importantly, there wasn’t much scrolling involved. The complacency of having solved two sets led to me being not fully locked in while solving set. I wasted about 10 minutes on this set and made the cardinal error of not looking at the questions beyond the first question. The set was also a bit slippery in that it was trickier than it seemed.

I quit this set and went to the elections and proposal set, which in hindsight was a terrible idea since even my colleagues found the set painful. I thought I can nail the Venn diagram sort of set, but there were far too many variables.

I then went to the question papers set, MT and ET spent some good time on it and solved a few questions.

The set that I should have done but left was the doctors set.

For this slot, the four do-able sets, according to me were — the rainfall scatter plot, the spider set, the doctors set, and the languages set. The ET/MT and the couch sets were also solvable but with more effort and by those who are comfortable with Mathematical Reasoning.

A QA section that was only a bit easier than last year

The QA section was not markedly easier than last year, it was only marginally so. This is where the rustiness was most visible since I have barely taught or solved the QA section over the past two years. I was really struggling with timing the ball. It was not that I not able to solve — I solved around 22 questions, I even managed to solve a few very fast using answer options, but overall I was not middling the ball at all, it was a very laboured stay at the crease, mostly twos and threes with few boundaries, and I think I made a few mistakes as well.

By the time I came out of the test centre the mood was starkly different from what I was feeling at the end of the first 90 minutes, I was angry and pissed with myself, I calmed down only much later once I met my colleagues at the centre, but I told myself that next year I have to take quite a few mocks before taking the test.

A big reason for my complacence was that I had taken the last year papers and did reasonably well, but the big catch was that I solved the papers with the PDF format open on my screen, which is heaven compared to the scrolling you have to do on a computer-based DI-LR.

Percentile Predictor

Based on the scores collected from our students and last years trends you can calculate your score and get an approximate prediction of your percentile here  —  IMS Percentile Predictor

Getting ready for the next event

I am sure there will be many of you who will be disappointed with what happened on D-Day. All I can say is that it is not easy to crack the test on your first or second attempt unless you are on the top of your game for at least 10 to 15 mocks with additional reserves to handle a tougher paper. I cleared the test on my second attempt.

Even those of you who have set your sights firmly on the old IIMs will be taking a few more tests, at least the IIFT exam and the XAT. Do not let yesterday affect you negatively. Now that you have the monkey off your back go ahead full-throttle on these other tests.

Even if you have decided on another shot at the CAT and IIM-A, give the other tests you have registered for seriously, crack a final admit to IIFT, NMIMS, SIBM, or XL and then reject it. — achieve something this season and set yourself higher goals for next year.

After coming back home from Pune last night at around1 AM, I was not sleepy. I decided to browse the New York Times and see if they added any good articles over the weekend and I came across an article with this famous Zen quote — “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

For Scrabbler’s take on Slot 1 – CAT — S19E01 – The one with the British English

And for the love of God, why the hell doesn’t the TCS CAT test-player have a PREVIOUS button!

Are you ready for a real test?

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From very early on in our lives we are exposed (or subjected) to this word called TEST. As we enter the higher grades, the role that TESTS play or are supposed to play in our lives steadily increases. If we look back, for most of us, tests have always been part of a trinity, they have always been concomitant with two other things —  fear and prayer.

At some point of time all of us, when faced with a test (including yours truly), have felt at the least a sliver of fear running through our bodies prior to a test and even most unbelieving of us have muttered a tiny little prayer under our breaths. Read More

Getting ready for CAT D-day

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I did something yesterday that I do not normally do (a few colleagues have been asking me to do this for a long time) — make a video log. Marshall McLuhan, a visionary sage whose predictions and analyses have mostly stood the test of time, famously said that the medium is the message. What he meant is that the nature of the medium ends up changing or determining the message.

One of the reasons why I have never done a video log is that in a visual medium the focus is on engaging the eyes of the viewer — photography, ads, movies — and my message is just words. So no wonder that after editing the video my colleague came and told me that at 40 minutes it is way too long and asked me if I can tone it down to 4 minutes! I ended up giving him a short sermon — if my goal is to engage the eyes of the students then I have to start performing in front of the camera, do a snappy 10 things you need to do sort of a thing (the good old listicle), constantly changing camera angles, keeping the edits super short but that is not the goal, the goal is to communicate a few things that are best read or listened to. Even here the medium makes a huge difference.

When I write I can take on a varied range of tones, write sentences of varying lengths, paint a picture that will activate the imagination of the reader. A friend was telling me a while ago that she barely reads nowadays (in sharp contrast to her past voraciousness),  but then she quickly rebalanced by saying that she watches a lot of documentaries and movies that are also another form of acquiring knowledge or getting entertained, so in effect maybe there isn’t much lost in this transition from reading to watching. I said there is much that is lost in the transition from reading to watching. A reader is active  — the words, the faces, the landscape, the conflict are all imagined in the reader’s mind, a reader is a co-creator, which is why the saying, never judge a book by the movie :-). A viewer is just consuming and not creating at all since all senses are blocked with none open to the imagination.

When we listen, say to a podcast, the experience is yet again different, the writer or speaker of those words exerts a much larger influence, through the most persuasive of all tools at our disposal — the voice — we feel that we really know the speaker. This is why even on film actors with great voices have always held a peculiar sway, especially the villain — you can have a hero with a weak voice (and God knows we have had a few of them)  but never a villain, a villain can’t even have a passable voice, it has to be overpowering (an actor I love in this regard is Hugo Weaving who excels both in V for Vendetta, where he has tons of dialogue and The Matrix, where he has barely any barring saying Mr.Anderson). A podcast that I have been listening to every day on my way to and back from work is Humane Arts by Wes Cecil, he is a professor in the US and most of the podcasts are actually recordings of actual lectures, listening to his voice makes me feel that I know him, I absolutely love the way he starts most lectures, and at times I feel it would have been great to sit in his class, but I also know that I haven’t missed much since his voice makes me feel as if I am sitting in his class and all that I am missing are the slides he shows. Those of you who are seriously interested in Philosophy, Languages, or the Arts, should most definitely listen to him, the others can give him a miss.

All of this just to tell you why I will never again try to do a video blog, a podcast or audio blog maybe, but by and large I will stick to words.

So instead of boring you with visuals, I asked them to just give me the audio version of what I shot. It is still not the same since if it was only audio to start with my tone would have been completely different.

What does the clip contain — the things to do from Friday till you take your chair on Sunday.

Getting ready for D-day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to manage your 180 minutes

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We have reached the last stretch now. If you are in a track and field race, you have turned the last curve and hit the straight. We have done enough concepts, practice & strategy. We have now crossed an invisible frontier, we have moved from the general to the specific, from what is outside of you to what is inside of you, to that space between your ears.

Those who have taken the CAT before will attest that how well you manage your 180 minutes, how well you react to tough set or a section, how well you are able to execute Plan A or switch to Plan B, everything, depends on how well you manage the space between your ears.

So let’s take it section by section, let’s look at each of the 60 minutes, let’s look at what you need to do right, what you need to watch out for and most importantly what can go wrong. Read More

CAT 2019 Miscellany: Morning Slot, Nervous Insomnia

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I was (though I should not have been) surprised that the post on the afternoon slot blues elicited requests for a post on how to handle the morning slot for those who are not morning people at all. It is natural that given the binary nature of tendencies at a broad level, for every aspirant who is a morning person there will be a corresponding night owl. I can’t say I have a cure for this but I can put forward a tentative plan that those uncomfortable with a morning slot can try out over the next few weeks.

Personally, I am not a morning person either, I would call myself a mid-morning person (I work best between 11 and 2). My natural time to wake up without an alarm (irrespective of when I sleep) is 7, the real waking up time is between 7:30 and 8:00.  Whenever I have to wake up earlier than 7, usually to catch an early morning flight, I end up not sleeping that well since I am aware of having to wake up, and if I have to wake up before 6, I barely sleep.

Now if I have to take the test in a morning slot this is far from an ideal situation on test day. But personally, for me, it will not be a problem because I will coast through on the pure adrenaline rush and sheer play that taking a test is for me. A lot of it comes from the fact that I enjoy taking tests and am good it as well, I am sure those of you who enjoy cricket or football or any other sport and are good at it (in the peer group with whom you play) can go and play well even without a good night’s sleep. But test-taking might be something that most normal people might not enjoy or look forward to. So given this, your task is to ensure that you are as physically and mentally switched on as possible by 9:30 A.M.

Change your sleep schedule

The first thing is to ensure that you start sleeping early; sleep with at a time that will give you the required the quota of sleep, which varies from person to person, to get up at 6 AM.

This is very obvious but the key lies in how to get this done.

To fall asleep naturally at 10 or 11 might not be easy for those who usually hit the sack after 12, for this happen you have to be terribly tired.

So if you want to start waking up at 6 AM from Thursday morning

  1. put a night out on Tuesday night (go binge-watch your favourite show, hang out with friends, minus any intoxication)
  2. do not sleep at all, not a wink on the whole day through to Wednesday
  3. take a warm water bath and have dinner by 9 PM
  4. switch off your phone, set an alarm for 6 AM
  5. get into bed with a book and you will crash

Once you do this on day one, repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 every evening.

Each one of you will need a different amount of sleep to feel fresh, 6 to 8 hours (if it is more than 8 then God can help you), so vary the timing of your dinner so that you sleep 90 to 120 minutes after having eaten.

Switching off your phone is crucial since it will eat into another 30 or 45 minutes and the bigger damage is that exposure to white light will prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep.

Ensure that you wake up and change your morning schedule

The above part is the easy part, the getting up when the alarm goes off is possibly the toughest thing in the world, at least for the night owls. Hence, for this, you will need an enforcer.

You have to designate someone to take the responsibility to bug the hell out of you to get out of bed. The best person for such a job has to be one of your parents, this might be something that they have always wanted to do to you for a long time. If you stay away from them, ask them to call you twice — once to bug you to turn off your phone off at night and one in the morning to keep calling you till you are up. Am sure this is a task that will make them very happy.

The reason I say that you need an enforcer is that studies have shown that will power is something that is highly over-rated and enervating, for example, more than having the things that you crave in front of you and then using will power to resist it, it is easier to ensure that you do not go into those situations or not have those things around. Similarly, using the help of others is a wiser, more self-aware way of going about things than watching more and more motivation videos to get pumped up to wake up (after a point motivation videos only make money for their creators, and if you need to keep watching them, then they are anyway not doing their job).

For those who are not used to waking up at 6, grogginess can be a big factor, so waking up and having a cup of coffee (black works best) might be the best way to switch on all of the lights. But making good black coffee can be an ordeal and it is addictive, also once the caffeine wears off, you can come crashing down, so taking a couple of Brahmi capsules after freshening up might be a better option.

Insomnia induced by test-day nerves

I am sure there are those of you who know that you will not be able to sleep the night before the CAT. The sheer nervousness, you are sure, will have you tossing and turning all night.

Even in this case the best option is to pull an all-nighter two nights before the CAT and not sleep during the day that follows so that the night before the CAT, fatigue will overcome nervousness and your body will crash to sleep. Do not leave this for the end, try it once or twice before.

More importantly, I feel that you should change the way you think of yourself with respect to the test. If you are operating from a space where you are still a school kid who is scared of tests, then you cannot get over the nerves. You have to understand that you cannot view the test in isolation.

If you want to be a management professional and do a course that is aimed at producing business leaders (if we go by the structure of the course, my personal experience of the course, and the mission statements of most b-schools) then you have to start behaving and thinking like a management professional and future business leader right now.

If you cannot handle this pressure at 21-22, then very frankly I do not see how you will manage and lead people in the future. If you will be a nervous wreck as a boss then God help your team-mates. And you can take it from me in writing that even your work life will have enough and more stressful situations that will have high stakes. Why wait till then, your MBA will have enough and more stressful situations, with placements possibly being the most stressful of all. Everything you want to be in the future you have to show potential today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAT 2019 Miscellany: Afternoon slot, test pattern, and diet blues

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The super-long Diwali weekend has been a good break and I thought for a change I’d use my desk at home to do a post on the all the small niggles here and there that keep popping up through the comments. I hope you guys used the break well 🙂

An afternoon slot for a morning person!

The admit cards are out and I once again I have gotten a city other than Mumbai, this time it is Pune and not Nashik like it was the time before, and it is an afternoon slot. It goes without saying half of the test-takers will have got an afternoon slot so, as Sheldon would say, it should not have come as a surprise.

But the question is what do we do now that you are supposed to be in prime test-taking mode from 2:30 to 5:30 and until now you have been taking tests in the morning? How do you beat the usual sluggishness in the afternoon and is it possible to go from sluggishness to full alertness?

The reason for our sluggishness is not as much as time slot as much as the fact that we have lunch around between 1 and 2, post which the whole body is focussed on one thing — digesting your food, your body is also heavier because you have just eaten and it is also satiated, all of these things put together are giving you a signal to relax and close your eyes for a while — a 180 minute test is the last thing on your mind (Those of you who attended my LMTC workshops would have noticed that I did not eat anything during the day except having copious amounts of black coffee, the main reason was that I did not want to feel sluggish even for a bit)

So there are a few things that you can do to ensure that you are switched in the slot.

  • Firstly, do not have a heavy breakfast, eat some fruits and nuts or a light breakfast (idli/poha as opposed to paratha/dosa) in a slightly smaller quantity along with a (morning) beverage of your choice, 60 to 90 minutes after you are up or whenever you feel slightly hungry
  • Have a big meal between 11 to 12, it should have sufficient protein, and a certain amount of carbs as well — for vegetarians (given my limited knowledge) something like rajma-chawal will work best, for non-vegetarians nothing better than rice/roti with some egg curry and veggies (two eggs along with the yellow) since it is the lightest protein. This meal should hold you till 5:30, you can figure out the right portion size in a week. of experimentation.
  • All of you should get the Brahmi capsules as it is excellent for alertness and immunity at the same time (I do not sleep well and wake up groggy, that is when I started taking it). Carry a capsule or two along with you and pop before you have to leave your bag and go into the lab.
  • In the lead up to the test, take as many tests as you can in the afternoon slot while following this schedule
  • Those of you who are working might find it tough to execute the mealtime but am sure if you really use put your head to it you can make it happen (just tell your colleagues you are doing intermittent fasting.

What diet should I have?

I was surprised to get a query around the kind of diet one should have but then I also remember that on Saturday I was talking to my colleague about physical fitness for test-taking, so in a way, the question is very relevant.

I will try to answer the question from whatever little reading I have done and whatever experiments that I have done with respect to diet and I will try to keep it really simple. This is something that everyone can take up irrespective of the slot.

Food can help you feel two ways, one — extremely happy, satisfied, heavy, and ready to hit the sack, which is what happens when you have food that you and maybe most people really like such as biriyanis, desserts (you get the drift). This state after this is perfect to watch something silly while lying down and going off to sleep, I have done and still do my share of this.

The other thing that I have also done is have phases where food made me feel another way — nourished and light, exactly the way one feels after eating some fruit.

Afternoon Slot .jpg

Given that all of you want to crack the third or fourth toughest test in the world (JEE, UPSC, Gaokao) I suppose you know which one of the two options you are supposed to choose.

So just eat a certain amount of fresh foods (fruits and nuts) and food that is not fried, overtly spicy, and oily (the non-vegetarians, please savour the meat and eat smaller portions), basically whatever your mom made in moderate quantities.

Also, stop eating when you are just about three-fourths full do not crave for the feeling of heaviness.  I have found that even milk makes me feel heavy or rather makes me aware of my gut and I hence cut it out of my system, you should try it as well.

And yeah, no snacks, at all, nothing out of a plastic packet, they don’t just make you feel heavy but bloated and make you crave strong flavours.

Give fasting a shot

One of the things you should try out is fasting once a week over the weekend since you would be needing energy for studying just skip two consecutive meals (dinner & breakfast or breakfast & lunch, the former is easier since you sleep through most of it).

The reason I like fasting is for two things — the body goes into specific phases that are very useful (do not waste time googling this, I have done it) and more importantly it forces you to gather all your will power and make it one-pointed, it makes you go into monk-mode. I will never preach what I do not practice, so it is safe to try, but do no force yourself or be harsh on yourself if you are unable to.

I just read yesterday that the surest way to destroy a person is to give him everything he or she wants. The corollary to this is that constraints are good. Things like fasting once a week are constraints that helps us reset and get more out of ourselves.

Exercise and if you need to shed some kilos, shed them

One thing that is least talked about is the importance of exercise for mental activities such as test-taking and I cannot vouch for this more. Whenever I sit at my desk for a long time, after a point I feel stale as if my brain is not working, all I need then is a good short walk and get the blood flowing through the body again. Movement is what gets oxygen into our system and makes us feel fresh.

It has been now proven that sitting for long period of time has many harmful effects and I know professionals who have desks that can be adjusted for height so that they can stand and work. You do not need to get one now but you need to counter the effects of sitting for a long time on your desk to prepare long with college or work.

All you need to do is a  light exercise at an intensity that only at the end of 30 minutes will make you breathe from your mouth. You should not be panting, your t-shirt should not be drenched. I would suggest a walk or a jog early in the morning or late at night or Yoga or (light) weight training for those who are already doing it.

As I have said before I cannot think of a better thing than adding a few breathing practices to your day.

Those who are slightly on the heavier side will do well to lose a few kilos and feel lighter if you do the things outlined so far, you should be able to (do not start any special weight loss program and start wasting time researching the same, just do what we discussed so far)

Some of you might be thinking, is all of this really necessary?

Well, yes and no.

If you are my friend who is a 10-time 100-percentile or one of his students who had a 100 last-year and scored just a mark or two fewer than him, you do not need any of this. These guys are at a level way beyond the test and the test doesn’t need them to stretch. If these guys have to compete on a different exam with many more people at their level I am sure they would also benefit from being in prime physical shape. But everyone else, including yours truly, can get better by being really fit.

Magnus Carlsen, the current world chess champion and the player with the highest ELO rating ever,  does a lot of exercise work as well, he works out every single day, basically a lot of aerobic training. He says it crucial to be able to sit and think for hours at a stretch, so yeah, if Carlsen does, you and I sure should.

Is there going to be pattern change?

The CAT as an exam has a penchant for getting something or the other wrong every single time. Sometimes the things that go wrong are for poor test-takers at a venue level never get reported. Sometimes, it is the kind of errors that we saw on the demo software they launched. There is no reason for me to elaborate on the same since and discuss it in detail. I think there will be no change in structure.

Even if there is, it changes absolutely nothing, it just makes things easier.

Keep prepping.

CAT 2019: A plan for the last leg

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At this stage, I realise that all of you are suffering from a different set of problems that occur at different score-levels. It is quite tough to come up with posts for the specific score ranges that different people are in and absolutely stupid to come up with a do-this-everyday-for-the-next-30 days sort of a thing (if you even think that is possible then you are preparing for the wrong exam). This post is intended to help you devise the best plan for yourself over the next thirty days.

Fix your desired set of colleges, tests, and percentiles

While everyone should and still aim to get into the old IIMs, each of one of you should also have a clear idea as to what the good colleges are for your profile for you apart from the IIMs.

When I say a good college for you, you should measure it in terms of the outcomes that will be commensurate with your profile at this stage.

An MBA primarily amplifies your current profile, this means that it will multiply whatever is your curent earning potential by a minimum of 2-2.5.

If your current potential is 6 or lower multiply it by 2.5 if it is between 6 to 7 multiply it by 2.25, 8 and above multiply it by 2.

If you are a fresher or studying in a good college, top 5 in your state, and have a good academic profile, you should get a job that pays at the least 6 LPA. This means that you need to look at an MBA college that has an average of around 14 LPA.

If you are a fresher or studying in a college, that will give you a salary of 4 LPA, you need to apply to colleges that will give you a salary of at least 10LPA.

The same applies to working professionals as well, irrespective of number of years of work-ex you need to look at your current salary and do a multiplication by 2-2.5.

Those who are in the higher pay scales should do a multiplication by 2 and also note that in the top-tier colleges the average might be 17-18 but the upper limit, the number of jobs with salaries above the average will be good enough to get you the desired jump.

Based on this list of colleges you need you to fix your desired tests and the respective target scores and percentiles.

The desired list and percentiles though cannot be looked at in isolation, the elephant in the room is your current potential on the CAT and other tests. So you have to choose the colleges both based on your profile and the percentile you are likely to score.

If you have a really high potential on the CAT and other tests as demonstrated in your SimCAT scores, you should aim much higher than your current earning potential. (More than a decade ago, I had a 2.5 lakh job out of campus but I was sure my aptitude on the CAT was good enough to get me a call from IIM-A, which eventually did happen, so I applied only to 2 schools apart from the IIMs) 

Estimate your actual percentile from best Mock percentiles

On the actual CAT, if you perform at the same level as you perform in the Mocks, your percentiles will be much higher.

The simple reason is that the Mocks are taken by the most serious CAT aspirants.

While more than 2,00,000 register for the tests, the Mocks are not taken seriously by more than 25000 students. On test day, out of the registered students around 30000 do not even turn up.

So the fraction that is percentile, x/y, will increase on test day since the denominator and numerator will become 6-digit figures and the rest of the crowd that shows up on test day is not going to do better than those who are preparing (India does not have that much bench strength).

What happens to the value of a fraction less than 1 if the numerator and denominator keep increasing — 2/3 < 3/4 <4/5 — it keeps on increasing. The question is how much will it increase by?

By half of the difference between 100 and your current percentile. If your current percentile is 80, it will become 90, if it is 90, then 95 and so on.

If you feel that you can increase your current mock percentiles by 5 more, then estimate your actual percentile after adding 5 to your current percentile.

On the CAT the scores correlate with the percentiles as follows:

95 percentile – 85-90
99 percentile – 100-105
99.5 percentile – 115-120
100 percentile – 140 and above

Now that you know your target scores, set incremental scores towards reaching them.

You are at 75 and have to reach 105, start with a target of 85-90.

For some of you, this increase might be evenly spread across sections and for others, it might be lop-sided, you have to do the break-up of the increase between the sections.

This is not easy to do. For example, if you are scoring 80 and are scoring above 30 in two sections and below 20 in the third, then your first area of focus should be on the one below 20 since the maximum scope of improvement lies here.

A good way to ensure that you prepare optimally is to execute the plan below.

A plan for the last 4 weeks

If this is your second attempt and you have cumulatively taken more than 40 Mocks, take only 8 tests in the last 4 weeks, 1 test every three days.

Everyone else should take 15 tests in the next 4 weeks, 1 test every alternate day.

Take-Home SimCATs are actual SimCATs from the last 3 years they are authentic or difficult as the current SimCATs, they feel different because you do not take them under any pressure.

After the tests and during the days between the tests focus solely on one area per week in whatever order is necessary for you, W1— DI-LR, W2—VARC, W3 — QA, W4 — Overall.

Obviously, this cannot apply to everyone. For those who are doing really well on QA and VA-RC and have a problem only with DI-LR, work for two weeks on DI-LR, you have to customise this plan.

What should you be doing during these weeks?

The four levers to higher scores

The four levers that you have to use to propel your scores are — Selection, Accuracy, Concepts, and Speed

No matter what your score the first thing you have to get right is selection.

Why Selection matters?

When you are consciously selecting the right questions to do you are taking the test and the test is not taking you.

All of you want to (or rather should since you are spending 20 lakhs for an MBA education) become a CEO or Founder in the future. What is fundamentally involves is to decide where and how to invest your money.

If 100 people come to you asking you to invest 2 crores each in 100 ideas and you have 200 crops at your disposal, what will you do?

  • will you give everybody 50 or 100 each and then depending on how they do will you give the rest or will you first do a quick evaluation of the soundness of the idea using some strong first principles and then decide to invest?
  • will you give money to ideas that are in industries you like or will you give money to ideas that will definitely generate money (if the goal is to make the most of your 200 crores)

During the CAT, you are investing money. So by not selecting questions and spending some time on each question you are investing money without evaluating ideas.

During each section, you are first supposed to play the role of CEO, deciding whether to do the problem or not, then be the worker solving the problem, and in parallel play the manager who is aware of the clock.

If you select and solve the right 75 questions and leave the remaining 25 by spending less than 20 minutes you will end up with a percentile above 99.

So the first task before anything else is for you to go and watch all the videos on how to select the right questions  in the CHANNELs section of the new myIMS, just go there and watch the LMTC videos in the recorded tab. If you have already watched this or attended LMTC sessions and are successfully implementing the methods then you can skip this part.

Accuracy

If you select and solve the right 50 questions and leave the remaining 20-25 by spending less than 10 minutes you will end up with a percentile above 99.

ATTEMPTS CORRECT SCORE
60 48 132
55 44 121
50 40 110
45 36 99
40 32 84

But this, as you would have realised, is contingent on you solving at least 80% of the questions right.

If I am guessing right, accuracy, is the biggest problem in VA-RC for almost all test takers and that is solely because there is in the way of a technique that test-takers apply.

While a lot of students have told me that the methods I suggested in RC-1 have been useful, they have also told me that they still are getting tougher questions wrong. They have seen RC-2 but they feel the methods are time-consuming. Yes, they will seem time-consuming to those who do not think in English.

But there is no way you can answer the questions correctly by reading passively all through and waking up right at the climax when you are caught between options.

All of the gyaan about eliminating extreme options, skimming and scanning, and their ilk are pure quackery, nothing more than candy to children.

There are no shortcuts to crack VA-RC, set a realistic target and solve questions in the technically correct way, else attempt more and be happy with a 60 per cent accuracy as long as you clear the cut-off, do not expect to boost your overall score through

If you have an issue with accuracy in VA-RC, go to the CHANNEL section on the Masterclasses and watch the RC-1 and RC-2 Masterclasses and the VA Masterclasses.

If you have an issue with accuracy in QA, go to the posts on this page —  https://thecatwriter.com/category/quant-strat/

Concepts

Once you are selecting the right passages, sets, and questions, and solving 4 out of 5 you pick correctly, you need to be able to solve a wide range of questions.

In QA, if you are only attempting questions from a few areas and are still not attempting questions from Logs and Geometry, then do so at your peril, there were 10 do-able questions from the two areas last year.

To quickly master concepts and application, go to the LEARN Tab in the new myIMS and watch all the videos there to get a good grasp of basic concepts and application.

If you are facing troubles in higher-level application in a particular area, then do all the problems from the e-MAXIMISER module.

For the DI-LR week or two weeks, the task is clearly cut out —20 sections or 160 sets — 16 SimCATs with 8 Sets each + 4 Actual CAT Sections (2017 and 2018 both slots)

If you need to learn to how to solve DI-LR sets better  —https://thecatwriter.com/category/di-lr-strat/

Speed

And yeah, at this stage honestly I have no tips to increase reading speed in general except to say that concentrate harder and read faster (if only we could embed the Blinkist app in our brains).

To increase solving speed I have no tips but to ask you to stop writing entire solutions on your paper, you do not need to show homework to your teacher. The test-takers scoring above 135 are not writing equations and cancelling out terms on both sides.

Where should I solve questions from

Irrespective of your level you should know how to solve every question in each of the proctored SimCATs and the e-Maximiser.

You can practice executing strategies between tests by solving Section Tests (apart from Section Tests in the Application Builder, you also can use the Take Homes as Section Tests by using exit section option).

You are really weak in an area and need to practice basics then solve the Concept module.

A quick summary

  • 10-15 Tests every alternate day.
  • 1-2 weeks dedicated to one section depending on where you are.
  • For each section move from selection to accuracy to concepts to speed.

Have a plan for each SimCAT

For every SimCAT you need to have a section-wise target score and a plan to reach that score.

  • VA-RC — I am going to get more marks from VA by solving them before RC and applying the right technique
  • DI-LR — I need to select sets better, I am still choosing one wrong set.
  • QA — I am going to get more marks from Geometry

To do this you should analyse a test well. When you analyse a test, especially the incorrect questions ask yourself — should I have attempted this question or set, did I follow the process of solving correctly (VA-RC), did I not read the misread or miscalculate (QA-DI-LR).

When you analyse a test, look at the skipped questions in QA and figure out the areas you need to strengthen and go to the LEARN Module videos.

I want to do well, I will kill this test — these are not plans they are dreams and feelings.

How to manage your feelings

In short, taking a test is not about feelings.

Getting disheartened when you see a low score, starting to feel pressure, anxiety attacks, all of these are things have nothing to do with solving a question.

The only questions to always ask are — Why did this happen, what did I do wrong, did I select the right set, did I pause after reading the RC question frame a shadow answer and then go to the options?

If you cannot get rid your feelings and get the job done when the task involves you and a piece of text on a machine, then you can forget managing others and leading firms. Honestly, you should consider another profession where someone else will handle the pressure and tell you what to do.

If you want to increase your concentration levels and manage work as well go through these posts:

I usually refrain from giving our set prescriptions like a does doctor, do these things every day because I do not think such things exist for test prep. I can only name problems and solutions, the better you are at diagnosing your problems the better you will be able to tailor a solution.

I feel this is an important part of the test itself —  if you cannot maximise your own performance using all the resources at your disposal, how will you maximise a company’s resources later in life!

Even an MBA will give you all the insights of what successful firms did and some technical knowledge specific to certain areas but when it comes to your first job post your MBA, you cannot cut, copy, paste anything that you learnt at business school, you have to tailor a customised solution using the resources you have.

To get rid of test-day jitters taking the Pre-CAT is not a bad idea since it will be conducted in an actual CAT Centre with similar pre-test formalities —  https://www.imsindia.com/pre-cat/

Cut the flab and the feel-good

I hope you have already deleted all the social media apps on your phone. If you have not then all I can say is that you are not committed to achieving your goal.

I hope you have no marriages to attend, no new year or Christmas parties planned, nothing other than CAT and other tests till the end of the first week of Jan. If you have other plans are then all I can say is that you are not committed to achieving your goal.

And the most important part of the last four weeks — get off all online CAT groups and CAT forums. Do not waste precious time discussing any more prep strategies with peers and finding out how much they have scored and commenting on the great scores someone else is getting.

As far as I know back then when I was preparing to take the test and right now when you guys are preparing to take the test, the goal was the same — squeezing every drop out of oneself and the test.

Everything was IRL then and I never went up to the guy who was topping my city (despite knowing him from college and being in the same test-prep institute) and told him — bhai tu toh phod raha hai.

I do not remember even discussing one thing about my prep with my friends who were preparing with me, we hung around after classes for some banter but that was it, I did not think there was any need to discuss anything with my peers since it was just me and the test.

It takes a village to raise a child, the saying goes, I do not think it takes a community to get a score, it takes a lot of brains to figure out where one is going wrong and more importantly why one is going wrong, and a lot of mental stamina and drive to push oneself to just max out.

Only two things should exist in the world for the next 9 weeks (till the XAT is over) — you and your test-prep material — no one else and nothing else.

CAT 2019: My scores have plateaued, how do I push them north

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We have about 40 days left for the CAT and the queries I am getting are reflecting the same. Aspirants have written to me saying that they have fixed the selection problem using the A-B-C approach and set selection approach for DI-LR and VA-RC and right now they have a different problem — scores have hit a plateau at their respective levels — 120, 135, 150. And most are facing the same dilemma —  I don’t want to increase my speed and go below the current scores and get demotivated, but if I don’t increase my speed my scores will not go up, what do I do.Well this post a more or less a summation of a long chat answering the same question that I had with an old student of mine today morning.

Are you squeezing every drop out of your brain cells

One of the things I know about test-taking is that your best scores will take everything out of you, you will not be doing it comfortably. All of us, including me, have two modes of solving, one is solving comfortably knowing that we will do well enough, this is the autopilot mode — you are driving the car at 60 and you can do it without having to concentrate very hard — the second is when you are fully on and are smashing your best times — you are driving the car at 80, you are aware of every turn, every bit of pressure you are applying on the accelerator and the on the brake.

When I solve a Sudoku puzzle in the autopilot mode, I do it comfortably in 5 minutes, I am okay wasting a few seconds here and there, my eyes are not wide open to figuring out the missing numbers, when I am on, I shave off a minute at the least and in the odd case even 2.

So to cut a long story short, you need to up the intensity during the 60 minutes of a section. But intensity is only half the battle, how and what do you direct the intensity towards?

Taking your VA-RC scores to the limit

The first question to ask is how many marks are you scoring from the VA question. Can you push it to a consistent 21 for every test from now on and how do you get there?

  • Does your intensity and focus to absolutely get the question right stop at RC?
  • Do you get complacent and mark answers in VA knowing that you haven’t locked them in the way you are doing on RC?
  • Are you happy finding a couple of links and quickly marking a combination for Parajumbles?
  • On a summary question, do you always stop to summarise the three things about the paragraph, after reading the paragraph and before proceeding to the options?

You will find that sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. The intensity with which you approach RC might be missing. So tighten that bit and focus on getting a 21.

On RC questions, you are getting all the direct/specific questions right but the moment it comes to inferences or indirect questions such as which if the following will add least depth to the author’s argument, you either make a mistake or are okay leaving it since you are getting the other questions right.

If you need to squeeze out more from the RC questions, you have to thread the needle on the tougher application questions. You have reached that stage of the match where you need to make the big shots, you can’t be comfortable taking a single, so ask yourself,

  • Do you pause at the end of the passage to paraphrase the main idea?
  • Do you pause at the end of a question and before going to the options to frame the function that the right answer should perform in other words the shadow answer

If you are not doing these things then you will always be stuck at these scores in VA-RC.
If you are already doing these things and have good accuracy, there is only way up, read faster, do not be scared, all you have to do while reading faster is concentrate deeper. Remember, it will not be comfortable, if you want comfort make peace with your current scores.

The best revision for VA-RC, go to the Channel tab on the new myIMS link that is there on the current myIMS, you will find the recordings of the all the Masterclasses, if you haven’t, watch RC the Masterclass 2. You can also solve SimCAT 10 and watch the solutions to the VA-Rc section the same that I have recorded.

Can you teach your brain new approaches to get hold of a slippery DI-LR sets

With DI-LR, aspirants say that they seem to have got hang of the selection to reach scores above 40 but then something like SimCAT 11 puts them back in the 20s.

A student had reached out to me about SimCAT 11 and did what I always do — solve the damn paper! I absolutely loved the paper, every set seemed do-able and there was that easy time-zone set right at the end that will elude even the classification that I have proposed. Ask yourself,

  • were you able to solve the first set on weighted averages, mathematical reasoning, in under 10 minutes?
  • Did you solve the super-easy DI-Calculation set, the spider graph, that only looked tough but was nothing but plain numbers (the set can be solved with one less a condition)
  • Were you able to crack the exquisite analytical reasoning sets that were the grocery sets and the conference set — one went into pure Sudoku space and another into a really good P&C and LR logic.

So much did I like the section that I walked over to my colleague who made it and told him that it was one of the best DI-LR sections I have taken since it was so slippery.

Like SimCAT 11 there will be other SimCAT DI-LR sections that have some awesome logic going on.

In the next 40 days, resolve the 16 SimCATs and 4 sets from CAT 2017 and CAT 2018 again. Select the right sets at the beginning, spending 10 minutes and then try to knock off 4-5 sets in 50 minutes.

Sit for an hour or more to analyse this:

  • Are you good at making number combinations of totals based on ratios given?
  • Are you able to figure that an equation such as 31x + 2y = 1025 can have only one pair of values that satisfy them and if x and y have to be multiples of 25 then you can start by substituting multiples of 25 for y and quickly find the value of x?
  • Do you realise that if 5 cells have the possibilities P/Q/R, R/T/S, P/Q/T, P/T, and P/T then P and T can be eliminated from the first three?

You will find that you are currently limited to a few approaches. When faced with Mathematical Reasoning sets, your brain does not throw up such suggestions to make number combinations or write equations.

If you spend enough time with the solutions of the 20 DI-LR sections that I mentioned earlier then you will teach yourself newer mathematical reasoning pathways.

I will do a video later in the month on the best DI-LR sets in terms of learning specific kinds of reasoning.

Do you step out of the crease to QA questions

Then there is a lot of you who like QA and score a comfortable 55-60 in QA. Can you do better in terms of core QA ability, yes, but are you doing it no. May be right since the beginning of the SimCATs you are scoring in roughly the same range, 22-25 attempts with 18-22 right. Are you happy with QA, yes, but then you also see people with similar ability attempting 30-32 and getting 27-29 questions right and wonder what they are doing.

Increasing intensity on the QA section means that you are solving at a faster pace than you normally solve and that happens in two ways. The first, writing fewer steps, never writing whole equations, to put it simply if people look at the solution to a question on your sheet they should not be able to understand a thing — it should just be a few numbers written here and there.

The second is by using shortcuts such as substituting the answer options and backsolving, approximating and eliminating, using ratios instead of equations to solve Arithmetic.

You will not be able to solve many questions by these methods but you should be able to pull out at least 4 to 6 questions in a short time, this would mean about 15-18 marks in 6 to 8 minutes. It is these questions that will propel your attempts and score.

Isn’t this exactly what England did to India in the World Cup — four of their batsmen, Jason Roy, Bairstow, Root and Stokes, hit six unconventional hits to the fence, primarily reverse sweeps. This not only accelerated their score but also put a lot of pressure on the bowlers.

Now some of you might say — Sir but if Virat Kohli can’t do it, can we? The fact is that if a batsman as staid and traditional as Joe Root can do it then anyone can. Indians did not try not because they couldn’t but because they felt they needn’t. Our high scores were a function of a couple of batsmen going big and not a function of an entire team having the array of unconventional strokes that have become common in the modern game.

Some of you might ask — Sir, but are they not high risk? Some of the shots in T20 cricket such as the upper-cut or the scoop or the ramp shot were shots that were started by an individual player but now they have become commonplace with everyone mastering it. Ben Stokes hit a reverse sweep for six in the recent historic chase during the Ashes, it means that it is no longer a high-risk shot for him, he exactly knows which balls to do it on, just like good solvers know exactly the question on which to use answer options. So start stepping out of the crease and go big.

Another thing that might be stopping you is that there still are one or two areas that you do not like to solve questions from, you might end up spending more time on a tougher question from your favourite area than do an easy one from an area you do not fancy. Revise the QA section of the SimCATs to go through them to look at easy questions from areas that you do not like.

We have given alternative solutions wherever possible on the SimCATs, go through them. We will later do a video with the best of these questions.

Around this time last year, a student had called saying the was from IIT-D and was scoring around 99.5, he needed a percentile above 99.7 to get a call from C and he was scoring around 60 in QA. And he said he was doing everything I said above. The only thing left was for him to increase his reading speed, not by much but by 10%, he was reading well within himself since he was scared of losing accuracy, I just asked him to concentrate harder and drive faster. He hid and scored a 99.89.

What to do in the last 40 days

You have reached a particular level, the last jump will mean that it will take more out of you mentally, but there is no way out. 20 tests, one every alternate day, with full intensity and in the days in between the things that I listed above.

You need to get used to performing at your optimal level. Optimal does not mean a number in terms of score, it means that if the test is really easy you hit it out of the park and if it is tough to still manage to clear the cut-offs. And yeah, a Sudoku puzzle every day with the goal to lower your best time.

And if you drive on your way to work or college, drive at your normal speed :-).