CAT 2017: How to get rid of sticky areas? Join club 99 with Self Preparation, coaching & Mocks

It is high time that you should get rid of all the sticky areas and bring conceptual clarity in your CAT 2017 preparation journey. Almost all the CAT toppers with 99 and 100 percentile suggest building and strengthening your fundamentals on all the relevant topics which are considered relevant for CAT 2017 exam. The goal can be achieved very well with self preparation, Mocks and help of CAT preparation experts and mentors, advise the CAT toppers.

For next 120 days, you need to deploy well focused efforts to prepare for CAT 2017 exam with devoted and directional self-preparation, plenty of mocks on CAT 2017 revised exam pattern and need based coaching, if you want to join club 99+.

Four months is a good time to prepare for CAT exam. The only thing you require is a meticulous preparation schedule, right study material and consistent practice. Synchronised with the self-preparation for CAT 2017, you will need a good CAT 2017 coaching centre that can offer well devised mock tests on revised CAT exam pattern to equip you with the assessment level after sharing the deep analysis of your mistakes.

CAT 2017 Preparation help links

• CAT 2017: IIMs’ hidden help for aspirants to get high scores; will IIM Lucknow follow the trend?
• CAT 2017: Prepare smartly to target IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta; overall CAT high scores not enough
• CAT 2017: 5 changes make it best ever CAT exam for Non-Engineers to get IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta

Past CAT toppers are of the view that it is a mix of your self-preparation with devoted self studies along with practicing on plenty of mocks available through CAT coaching institutes – offline as well as online, which can take you through the ordeal of exam.  

CAT toppers suggest to opt for the need based coaching and plenty of mocks covering sectional and overall CAT syllabus on CAT 2017 exam pattern before your CAT 2017 exam day. These are the preferred tools to help you score 99+ percentile in each of the three sections in CAT 2017 exam. 

Coaching provides structure: Rest you need to do
According to the toppers coaching helps you with the structure it provides and if you feel you can structure your preparation without coaching, there is no need to join it.

Another thing that is shared by almost all the CAT toppers and even successful candidates in Civil Services is that during their preparation they found that coaching in itself was not so useful for the classes. What they teach in class is very limited and after that you do need sufficient self study to be able to crack this exam.

3 points: How to choose the best coaching
Whether it is CL, TIME, IMS, VistaMind, MBAUniverse.com or other offline or online study and preparation centres for CAT 2017, the problem before the CAT aspirants is how to choose the best one that can help to smoothly steer through the CAT exam.  Below are shared 3 key points to guide you how you should choose your coaching centre in case of need

Choose one that helps to overcome weakness & saves time
CAT 100 percentilers and toppers Pranjal Agarwal, Neha Manglick, Pranjul Gupta, Vishesh Patni among others preferred self preparation along with the need based coaching from the study centres that helped to overcome their weaknesses and advise the same strategy for CAT 2017 aspirants.

CAT toppers are unanimous that the help of coaching should be need based to take you out of the sticky areas. A generalised coaching may not be of much help to the required standard.

Check for the best faculty to improve your grey areas
All the CAT toppers are unanimous and advise to choose a coaching institute as per your preferences. This is also agreed by the Verbal Ability expert and mentor on CAT 2017 preparation Prof S K Agarwal who thinks that there are some CAT coaching centres or CAT preparation institutes where the finest faculty on one section and different topics may be available for example on Quant, DI, LR.

But, it is not necessary that the same coaching institutes also have the faculty with same expertise and depth of knowledge on Verbal Ability, Reading Comprehension or other subjects and topics of the same standard. This is applicable to all the coaching institutes and their different centres running in the country. So you need to make sure to choose the best as per your requirement.

Avoid the Coaching that confuses you
If your coaching centre creates more confusion instead of bringing more clarity to your concepts and approach to solve the questions, avoid it. In view of the CAT toppers what you can do more accurately and with greater speed with your self-preparation may get halted if the coaching centre is teaching you with different strategy which can altogether confuse you also.

Unless and until the Coaching centres add value to your preparation speed and help you out of the dilemma you are in, it may turn into wastage of time instead of providing you required assistance to crack CAT 2017 with higher score. Your fast strengthening movement should be further sped up at the coaching centre instead of getting slowed down. 

CAT preparation strategy by 100 percentilers

Pranjul Gupta and Vishesh Patni
The 100 percentilers in CAT recommend self study ‘although coaching can help save your time on topics and questions where you are stuck’. Both of them made sure to go for serious self-study apart from joining need based coaching classes. The message is to go for a mix of study plan combining self study with guidance from coaching. Both advise the CAT aspirants that they should remain unbiased and must aim to crack around 85 questions with accuracy in CAT exam.

Neha Manglick
Started her serious self preparation for CAT around May/June, just 5 months before the exam. This is the same starting time for CAT 2017 aspirants. Her major focus was on self study instead of running here and there to prepare for the exam. And the result was 100 percentile in CAT.

Neha took some help from offline and online coaching in her preparation on the topics where she got stuck, but the overall CAT preparation strategy was with self-studies.

Neha preferred to search for more than one way to attempt and solve the questions with accuracy and this proved to be her greatest strength during the exam.

Avidipto Chakraborty
He cracked CAT 2016 with 100 percentile and strongly favours the Self-Preparation as the most reliable CAT preparation strategy. Clarity on concepts through Books, online practice tests of TIME, CL, IMS, MBAUniverse.com, VistaMind among others could be much helpful. Avidipto says “I took 86 mock tests for preparation and trusted almost 90 per cent on the analysis.”

Most of the CAT toppers are those who have remained focused on self preparation and opted for need based coaching and more mocks as per the revised CAT exam pattern to practice as much as possible and get accurate analysis of the errors in mocks.

Experts’ suggestion
The decision to join coaching or not is very personal. There is no one rule to it. You may join a coaching which nobody else joined and succeed or you may join one that everybody joined and fail. You need to decide based on your strengths and weaknesses whether to join coaching or not. The statistics reveal that around 1 lakh candidates enrol at coaching institutes and rest others work hard on their own.

No doubt nothing can substitute your self-preparation but why then there is need to join a good coaching institute to give wings to your preparation? What do they teach and prepare you for CAT 2017 in Coaching Institute that you cannot study yourself- is a big question with a single line answer–They teach you, what to and what not to study in a time frame. You opt for the coaching to maintain your regularity, to keep away your laziness and to maintain your enthusiasm and inspirational level through-out.

Most of us feel shy of following a tough study schedule unless we are compelled to. It is also a fact that only coaching without follow-up self-study can’t create miracles and as such a CAT 2017 aspirant needs a mix of them- a very good coaching followed by suggested study schedule.

Common Admission Test (CAT) 2017 is the mandatory entrance exam for admission to MBA/PGDM 2018-20 in 20 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and top rated Management colleges like FMS, MDI, SPJIMR, NITIE, IMI, IMT, JBIMS, TAPMI, BIMTECH and many more B schools located across the country.

The CAT 2017 convener, IIM Lucknow is renowned for its different and unique approach in management education and is expected to bring more changes in CAT 2017 exam. With 120 days available for preparation, you need to follow a systematic and meticulous study plan to score high in CAT 2017 given the fact that CAT may throw more surprises.

Stay tuned to MBAUniverse.com for more updates on CAT 2017

See Also:

• CAT 2017 to be a single-day two-session exam; likely Exam Date is November 26: MBAUniverse.com
• IIM Ahmedabad Admission 2018: CAT 2017 cut offs announced; needs 70 sectional percentile
• CAT 2017 Notification release on July 30 by IIM Lucknow; 5 do’s on this Sunday
• CAT 2017: Online Registration & Application begins on scheduled date; be ready with your documents