Should I quit my job to prepare for CAT?
Every year in the March-May period, a lot of CAT aspirants contemplate quitting their jobs to prepare for the CAT, this post is outlines the things that you need to consider before taking that call.
All posts tagged: CAT Preparation
To re-take or not to re-take the CAT
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.
10 Things To Execute On CAT Day
Unlike international tests like the GMAT or the GRE, the CAT is not a standardized test, there can be — new question types, fluctuation in difficulty levels, more questions than expected from a particular area. Given this, it is imperative that you go into the test with a few pointers both to manage the uncertainty as well as to ensure that you optimise your performance during 180 minutes.
Are you ready for a real test?
From very early on in our lives we are exposed (or subjected) to this word called TEST. As we enter the higher grades the importance 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.
What do you see yourself doing on CAT Day?
One of the biggest questions that you need to ask yourself is how do you think of yourself with respect to life? Do you think of yourself as an individual who makes life happen or to whom life happens? Do you see yourself at the doing end of things or at the receiving end of things? Do you believe or do you hope?
How to manage your 180 minutes
We have reached the last stretch now. 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.
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.
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.
How to increase your accuracy on the Verbal Ability section
The Verbal Ability section of the CAT has always been one of those things that never fails gets my goat. To me it has never made any sense at all! Why do they want MBA aspirants to read passages by philosophers (and sometimes poets) and then answer questions set by non-philosophers or people who fancy themselves to be philosophers know at least three idioms in which the word “DONKEY” is used correctly and one in which it is incorrectly used — the one I marked as incorrect was — The Professor could talk the hind legs off a donkey — of course only a professor capable of that could make that question! keep unjumbling paragraphs when there can always be more than one way of arranging sentences to form a coherent paragraph. This is one of the big reasons why I like and respect the precisely designed Verbal Section of the GMAT and also teach a lot for the same! But be that as it may, we have a job at hand — to clear the …
CAT 2018: How to improve your QA percentile – Part III
In the previous two posts, we took a look at the first two building blocks to increase your score and percentile on CAT Quant — Accuracy & Question Selection. In this post, we will look at the third building block — if the first two blocks provide the impetus towards the higher score, this block is the one from where you take off towards a higher score — Speed.
The CAT Writer 