MBAUniverse.com sought advice from PT Education -- one of the leading MBA test prep companies, on their last minute tips for MAT takers.
Offering his advice, Mr Subhasish Mitra, Vice President, Knowledge Resources Group (KRG) at PT Education said, "In the last few days building up to the MAT, the student should spend time in reviewing his strength areas. Students should develop the mentality of attempting questions only from their strength areas. To try and answer all the questions is an impossible task and a mere pipe dream."
Considering the MAT pattern, Mr Mitra also asked students to take practice tests. "Taking some practice Tests is also a good idea. Keeping in mind the pattern of the MAT - mathematics is more formula dependent and Verbal is more Vocabulary dependent, it would be good if the student can spend time reviewing the important formulae and going through the flash cards/word lists," said Mr Mitra.
Mr Mitra further added, "Most importantly, Relax! You have learnt all there is to be learnt. This is not your Graduation exams wherein you can cram till the last moment. You cannot learn anything new at this stage. It is more a test of how well you can apply all that you have done till now. So, the more you can unwind, the better it will be for you."
While sharing the PT Education's S-S-S-S strategy to test taking, said Mr Mitra, "The intelligent student will be one who can quickly Scan the paper, Search for "comfortable" questions, Select them and then start Solving them. At PT Education, we call it the S-S-S-S strategy to test taking."
When asked how PT Education compared MAT with other management entrance exams, Mr Mitra said, "The difficulty level would be considerably lower than the other exams like the CAT, XAT, FMS, IIFT etc. Data Interpretation is more of a calculative nature. Getting a score of 80-85 percentiles would mean scoring somewhere around 625+ (out of 800). Although the MAT says that the scores of the General Awareness section are not included in the final score, it would not be advisable to leave the section completely."
Emphasizing on the good accuracy in MAT, said Mr Mitra, "Students who are targeting the top B-schools would need to attempt (at least) 125 questions, with a reasonably good (90-95 %) accuracy level to expect a call from the better MAT allied colleges."
