Latest Posts

How to increase your VA accuracy on the CAT

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Choosing between premier b-schools other than the old IIMs

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As the years pass it seems to me that the decision-making process that goes into choosing a b-school is getting more and more complicated. This might be the reason behind me getting messages and emails asking for help in choosing between the premier non-IIM b-schools such as FMS, XL-BM, MDI, SPJIMR, NITIE and others. This post will address this specific issue. Read More

How to prepare for a CAT retake – Part II

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In the previous post, we discussed the mindset with which one should approach a CAT retake; in this post, we shall look at a few more aspects with respect to a successful CAT retake. Since each one of you readers will have a different back story with respect to your first attempt and there will also be some non-IMS students among you as well, the focus of this post will be a bit wider.

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How to and not to evaluate your first SIMCAT performance

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The response to the first SIMCAT was great and it was nice to see so many students jump into the fray from the word go. But the plunge as most of you would know is similar to jumping off a diving board for the first time — the moment of impact, the bewilderment when you are under the water and most importantly the desperate eagerness towards the end to somehow get back to the ground again. (I have never jumped off a diving board but was once caught under the waves on the beach when I was quite little, thankfully my dad managed to rescue me).

Just like you would not bother too much about the score given to your first ever dive do not think too much about the score you got. This is neither an engineering exam nor a blood test. So what is it and how should you evaluate your performance?

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How to prepare for a CAT retake – Part I

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Most of the institutes have given out their calls and many of you might be planning to retake the CAT. For some of you, it might be a case of almost getting there but missing out because of one poor section or just missing out on the overall percentile. For others, the CAT-day might have been a bad day at the office and you knew straight away that nothing much was going to happen.On my first attempt, I fell into the latter group — I knew I was out of my depth when I saw the Quant paper, there was no way I was going to clear the cut-offs. This despite consistently doing very well in the Sims leading up to the test. I decided to take another shot since I was very clear that it was not out of my league.

This post, in three parts, is for all those re-takers who are NOT hoping to get lucky next time around but want to ensure that they leave no stone unturned to make the cut in their next shot at CAT. Read More