Latest Posts

How to increase your accuracy on RC – 1

So much of a 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, despite the previous post and the Last Mile To CAT sessions, that I thought that it will be best to devote a series of posts to cracking Reading Comprehension. So before we dive in, I suggest that you read the previous post that outlines how to choose which RCs to solve.


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How to increase your VA accuracy on the CAT

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? Read More

The IIM Selection Criteria: Will I get a call from the IIMs?

Apart from the — how many questions should I answer to score a 99 percentile on the CAT — question, one of the questions that I get asked to answer most frequently both from my students as well as people on Quora is the one that is more or less framed as follows:

I have X% in X, Y% in XII and Z% in GRAD, will I get a call from the IIMs?

Given that this is such a popular question, I think it is time to dedicate a post to the same. Read More

CAT 2019: Setting the right targets on your way to a 99 percentile

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… Read More

CAT 2019: How to manage work and prepare for the CAT

With the mountain called the CAT now in sight, most working professionals will be wondering how to mount another challenge to get into the old IIMs.

The biggest obstacle in front working professionals will be juggling a job and prepping for CAT at the same time. Some of you in this situation will have decided to quit your job, hopefully only after having read my post on the same and having understood the implications of quitting.
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Work with us

As most of my students would know, I have been with IMS for more than a decade now.

But I started teaching for aptitude tests way back in the past, right after my graduation while preparing for the CAT a second time around.

At that time I felt that the teaching stint had a great role to play in my cracking the CAT; I felt the teaching made my thought process very clear when faced with a problem since one has to have utmost clarity of thought to explain a problem in such a way as many students understand the solution right away. Also one is always looking to find better, cleaner or to put it simply more elegant solutions to problems.

My first 6 years stint with IMS was with the Academics Dept and the last six months have been at the front-end teaching as well as running the business.

Starting I have moved back to the IMS HO in Mumbai, as the Chief Learning Officer (CLO) for IMS.

Over the past year, I have met a lot of students across the country who are readers of the blog, so I was wondering if any you might be interested in working with us.

We are looking for people to work with us in the digital content development team for the Verbal and Quant areas. The role involves working with our subject matter experts, supporting them to create learning and strategy videos across products.

The remuneration will be depending on your profile. The roles will be based out of Mumbai.

More importantly, if you are taking another shot at the CAT, you have the brains of the best mentors to pick :-).

If any of you are interested then drop in a mail to tony@imsindia.com with the following:

  1. A resume or CV
  2. A short answer as to why you feel you have the skill sets to take up a teaching role or a content development role in Verbal/QA-DI-LR. Experience is not mandatory since you have to start somewhere, I myself had no experience at all when I started teaching or designing content. Feel free to include anything that you feel will let us know why you feel you have the potential to take up the role — CAT, XAT, GMAT or other exam test scores (SimCAT scores, if you have a tendency to bomb on test day), reading habits, prior informal teaching, love for the section, communication skills — anything that you feel captures your suitability.