With no information on total or sectional number of questions proposed to appear in CAT 2016, candidates are in dilemma how to prepare and face the CAT 2016 in its changed pattern. At this juncture, MBAUniverse.com conducted live session on August 23, with Pranjal Agarwal, CAT 100 percentiler and IIM Ahmedabad student who participated and guided the CAT 2016 aspirants to help them come out of the dilemma and shared tips how to prepare in next 100 days to score high in the exam.
MBAUniverse.com has been receiving queries from the candidates. This prompted us to organize a live session with Pranjal Agarwal, CAT topper and IIMA student who shared important tips how to prepare and crack CAT 2016 with high score.
Pranjal Agarwal, a student of IIM Ahmedabad PGP 2016-18 batch was in final year of BE (Hons) Mechanical Engineering at BITS Pilani when he made news after cracking CAT 2015 with 100 percentile. Summary of the session is shared below
CAT 2016 syllabus; how to cover
CAT 2016 aspirants like Disha Rawat working in IBM Hyderabad needed to know about the syllabus to be covered selectively for CAT 2016.
Sharing his opinion and preparation strategy, Pranjal, the CAT topper guided the aspirants about the CAT syllabus and what does it consist of, stating that the exam last year was divided into three sections; VA, DI/LR, and QA. The Verbal Ability section consisted of Reading Comprehension passages followed by questions, some sentence jumbles and questions on paragraph fluency. 24 questions were passages and the rest 10 were sentence jumbles.
DI/LR consists of question sets of 4 each, 4 sets for DI and 4 sets for LR. DI could be based on venn diagrams, pie charts/line graphs/histograms and LR sets don't have a defined syllabus, but you can look into Einstein problems.
QA consisted of topics that were covered in math until Class X, the difficulty level does not exceed that. For a better idea of difficulty, you can look upon the official CAT website for the syllabus and also check out the official mock CAT that they will release later. This syllabus and paper pattern may or may not change this year.
Go for Full length Practice test
Candidates who have not been able to prepare beyond Quant or other section are worried. Pranjal, IIMA student advises the strategy how to proceed –
-- Take a full length practice test and see where you currently stand, without preparation.
-- Then, focus on improving your weaknesses.
-- To improve on English and vocabulary, it is advised to read the newspaper or magazines, just for maybe half an hour each day, and if possible, discuss things with others. It will help increase your reading and comprehension speed.
-- Try to determine the meaning of difficult words using context clues instead of looking directly into a dictionary. You won't have that option if a difficult word comes up in CAT.
100 days sufficient to prepare for CAT 2016
Responding to the queries whether it is possible to prepare well for CAT 2016 in 100 days, Pranjal says “100 days are enough to prepare for the CAT but I would not advise to start from the basics of everything because there would be many topics which you are already strong in”
The key tips Pranjal shared are-
-- First attempt a sample test, find out where you are weak and study only those sections/topics from the basics.
-- It might be a little difficult if you are also working, but try to take some time out on the weekend to give a test each week and then review your results;
-- Focus on practicing your weak topics
-- If the weakness is in concepts, you should study them from the beginning, but if you find time limits and issue, then the suggestion from the topper is to practice with sectional tests of an hour each.
How to manage time
Responding to the queries on how to manage time while preparing for CAT 2016, Pranjal Agarwal shared following –
“Take one mock test each week, pick a day like Saturday; then spend another day to analyse results and prepare a list of weak topics or sections. Spend a few hours throughout the week to focus on those topics or sections. For time limits, take sectional tests and for concepts, study only those topics/question types from the basics.”
Important Quant concepts
Sharing about the important concepts on Quant, Pranjal advises that most concepts require elementary maths. Basically, you must be able to frame the problems in an equation or inequality. Important concepts are profit/loss, distance/speed, time measurement on a clock, area/perimeter/volume of figures. You must also understand the units of quantities and must also be able to understand the physical significance of the value being asked in the question.
How to attempt RC passage based questions
If time is an issue, then try to go over questions before reading the entire passage and identify the keywords that relate to the question. Try to look for those keywords in the passage and then answer questions. Moreover, some questions refer to specific paragraphs in the passage, which limits your scope to read.
Section-wise Preparation strategy for CAT 2016
Take an initial mock test to gauge the performance in all the topics, Pranjal advises to practise problems of the topics which you are getting a lot of questions wrong in, or are unable to attempt. Sharing his own strategy Pranjal says “As for topics where I was doing well, I did not bother to revise them because they were quite basic to me. I'm sure everyone would find several topics very simple for them.”
According to Pranjal “I found my weakness lied in the VA section, so I worked on improving that by studying the topics I did bad in, mainly technical grammar. In DI, I struggled a little with Venn diagrams until I learned to use visual aids by drawing the diagrams. I would advise the same for anyone else because three months is not enough time to study each topic from basics and moreover, it is not necessary even.”
For QA and DI sections, Pranjal shares his preparation strategy “I only practiced sectional length tests to improve on my time spent, because there were occasions where I was unable to attempt all questions. I would advise the same to all aspirants here; study weak topics from the basics and give tests up to a level such that you are able to go through, if not attempt, all questions in the 3 hour time window. This is necessary because at least you should be able to have the chance to attempt all, whether you actually attempt depends on your confidence to answer the question.”
Methodology to tackle DI and LR sections
In DI, it is advisable to just eliminate other options by doing coarse calculations. Even though you are given a calculator, it is time-consuming to use it. Sharing his experience Pranjal says “I just try to round figures like 193 to 200 and work with those to get a rough idea of what the final answer could be, which saves a lot of calculation time.”
If the options are wide apart in value, it is ok to take such shortcuts. If they are close together, then it is risky. In LR, the question sets generally require you to visualize the situation. Pranjal preferred to draw on a rough sheet and then work about eliminating possibilities. Even for Einstein problems, Pranjal advises to try to make rectangles and lists, while eliminating possibilities of list items for each rectangle. Also, questions appear in sets. If you are unable to solve the first question of a set, it is highly likely that you could solve the other questions.
Sharing his test room strategy, Pranjal said “As for time management, I went straight in order to attempt all the question sets. On one question set I was stuck for around 10 minutes, at which point I decided to skip it. I still managed to solve the other sets. In DI/LR problems, where questions are generally set-based and you generally can't solve all the questions of the set if you miss one, you should be able to gauge whether you should let it be and still have enough time for the rest.”
Don’t skip core topics in Quant preparation
Candidates with Commerce, Arts or Science back ground find it difficult to crack questions on certain Quant topics like permutation and combination, function among others. They wanted to know if they could skip them. However, Pranjal is against skipping any of these topics and advises not to skip them. The reason shared by him is “Even if you have not studied them and you are opting for an MBA, you will need to study them sooner or later. Try to learn them or at least get to a stage where you can solve simple problems in them. Take a look at last year's CAT to get an idea of the complexity of problems; the exam setters also keep diversity in mind when designing the test. If you already plan to skip 4-5 questions, your score already decreases by 15-20, so that is not advisable.”
Type of questions on Elementary Math
Responding to the queries about the number and type of questions asked on elementary Math Pranjal shares his experience that CAT QA section generally comprises of word problems or questions where you have to identify what is being asked and then use elementary maths to get the answer. There will be very few straightforward questions that involve math. “As for my CAT test, I had attempted all questions but missed one set of 4 questions in the DI/LR section”, Pranjal adds.
How to tackle weak areas
Pranjal’s strengths lay in QA and DI/LR sections and he was relatively weak in VA, especially in grammar sections, because he had little understanding of rules and word forms.
According to Pranjal, “I benefit from the change in CAT design because the grammar portion was reduced and it also consisted of sentence jumbles, which were also more comprehension based. I had prepared for VA by giving practice tests for that section only. I was also weak in some topics in DI, namely venn diagrams. I improved by going over some of the most difficult questions and their solutions to understand the logic behind the equations that are there. That helps us better understand the problem. Then I practiced some question sets and did so until I felt confident enough. But your preparation in any topic is only complete if it reflects in a full length test, because that is a continuous 3-hour affair with no breaks. It's quite different from sectional tests or practice problems.”
Better to dig last year CAT pattern
Since CAT 2016 exam pattern is same as that of CAT 2015, it will be beneficial to dig out the last year CAT paper in the sense because you have no last minute surprises coming up in the official CAT mock test.
It was very different for CAT 2015 test takers, especially because the test takers were unaware of the functions that would be provided to them in the calculator and the increase in the complexity of questions that would follow. Pranjal would recommend to go through the CAT 2015 and prepare according to that, but it is still possible that another mock is released which may have minor changes in the pattern or difficulty level of questions. Until that happens, the best option is to study according to the previous pattern only.
Improve on Mock percentile
If you are not getting good Mock percentile, Pranjal suggests to take a mock every week. You have around 3 and a half months, roughly 11-12 mock tests to go. If you are able to consistently improve over each period, it really isn't that difficult to achieve a good percentile.
How many Mocks you should take till CAT 2016
Pranjal recommends to keep taking mocks until you feel you are getting a good enough score in all sections and that too, consistently. Also, make sure you give at least 2-3 in the last month before CAT because the mocks help you maintain the habit of solving 100 questions in 180 minutes, if nothing else is improving. So, basically, no number of mocks is enough, but in his view if you take one per week here onwards, it should be good enough. All in all, it depends how much you are able to build on your weaknesses that you identify in each mock test.
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