Now that the CAT scorecard is out, the time to start preparing for WAT-GD-PI has come. But how does one go about it? It all seems like a vast sea with no beginning and no end. A single post covering all the three — WAT, GD & PI — will be unwieldy, to say the least, so I will do a series of posts that will help you kick-start your prep for the second-stage.
The XAT is closer now and it seems that it is the VA-RC section of the XAT that is causing the most trouble for test-takers. DM seems to be a beast that is now manageable and QA is fairly manageable as well, it is VA-RC that seems insurmountable.
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I never thought I will be doing a timing strategy post since the CAT has gone with fixed sectional time-limits for a long time now. But a reader asked for one for the XAT and thought it might not be a bad idea to do a short post on the same.
I have always preferred a test without sectional time-limits since it tests a crucial quality required for management — optimizing resources to achieve maximum return on investment. In this case, the resources are your own skills and the investment is your time.
So how does one go about using the 165 minutes on the XAT?
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In the previous post ,we discussed how Decision Making can be the undoing of XAT aspirants and tried to understand the nature of questions that come up on the section.
We took up two sets from the Decision Making section of a past XAT and discussed a structure to answer DM questions. In this post, we shall look at the remaining questions from that paper.
One of the most tedious and inscrutable sections that you will find across all management entrance tests, Decision Making has been the nemesis of many a XAT aspirant. A lot of factors contribute towards DM possibly being the biggest stumbling block on the XAT. But none is bigger than the fact the amount of time any test-taker would have spent preparing for DM when compared to any other section is minuscule. This coupled with the dislike and unease most aspirants have towards reading, and the extremely subjective nature of questions ensures that DM ends up becoming the deal-breaker as far as the XAT is concerned. Read More
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
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.
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 :-).
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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.
