CAT 2016: To join group of 90 plus percentile, only studies not enough; need to have few more things

Add Review

MBAUniverse.com News Desk |
September 2, 2016
CAT 2016 aspirants should be aware of this fact that IIMs need a high balanced sectional percentile instead of only high overall percentile
The important part that we need to know is whether the score of 95 or 99 can be achieved only by studying for 24 hours or there is some other strategy and criteria that may add to your score in CAT 2016

CAT 2016 aspirants should be aware of this fact that IIMs need a high balanced sectional percentile instead of only high overall percentile. All the IIMs fix a minimum sectional cut off. Usually, the minimum sectional cut off is 80 but IIM Ahmedabad has for the first time in its history has lowered the sectional qualifying percentile to 70 for admission to PGP 2017-19. The overall qualifying percentile for all top rated IIMs is minimum 90 except IIM Ahmedabad which has fixed it to 80 only.

According to Prof S K Agarwal, expert on Verbal Ability and mentor on CAT 2016 preparation “It is true that dream of getting into the flagship PGP 2017-19 batch of IIM A, B, C, L and other IIMs and top B schools may not become a reality unless you score 90 plus percentile in Common Admission Test (CAT) 2016. But the important part that we need to know is whether the score of 95 or 99 can be achieved only by studying for 24 hours or there is some other strategy and criteria that may add to your score in CAT 2016.”

First stage shortlisting by IIMs: Things you need
Apart from CAT 2016, IIMs will consider other factors in the 1st stage shortlisting. You have to assess yourself whether you have all of them or can compensate one by another. These parameters are-

-- CAT 2016 high overall and sectional percentile score
-- Excellent Academic Profile from class 10/12 to bachelor’s degree
-- Academic diversity – Non-Engineers are awarded additional weightage
-- Work experience – additional weightage is awarded
-- Gender diversity – a female is awarded higher weightage

Can’t do much on others; concentrate on CAT 2016
You cannot change your academics, gender nor can add much to your work experience as of now. To compensate on all of them you need to score high sectional and overall percentile in CAT 2016.

In fact, it is not necessary that you have to be super intelligent to score 90+ percentile in CAT 2016 or need to study 24 hours to achieve the goal but you should be able to intelligently plan well how to succeed with high scores to achieve the goal.

Don’t accept defeat before you compete
According to Prof Nishit Sinha, IIM Lucknow alumnus and author of CAT preparation books published by Pearson ‘You will win, if you are confident’. Those who believed that they are going to make it happen to them and came out of their mental block and any negative thoughts before marching on preparation for CAT, they got through while other lagged behind.

Don’t think you will not succeed
Emphasizing his point Prof Sinha shares that even average candidates can score high scores provided they believe in themselves. If you think you will not succeed you don’t deserve to appear in CAT 2016.

It is like accepting the defeat before the match begins. No Indian would like M.S. Dhoni to captain the team in the next World Cup Cricket if he says on day 1 that we are not going to win World Cup? Apply the same yardstick for yourself too.

‘0’ in CAT=55 percentile; prepare well
You should prepare to win, says the expert Prof Nishit Sinha and adds “Statistically speaking Zero marks in CAT is equivalent to 55 percentile. That means almost 55% of total aspirants got zero marks or negative marks. Please NOTE it is primarily because they believed they cannot and won’t get into IIMs since initial days of their preparation.”

Need to be among top 12000
Real fight, according to Prof Sinha is among a max of 50,000 - 60,000 aspirants. To get at least one IIM call, you need to be among top 11,000 - 12,000 candidates. Forget about other 1.5 lacs.

5 point strategy to win
This is the more important part how others got into IIMs while you are still gathering courage to appear in CAT 2016 and are finding ways and means how to score high percentile

Identify yourself
Identify your natural strength area - that can be quant or verbal or may be none. Anyways, DI / LR is more about practice, practice upon quality content, regularly.

No biased preparation
There were 34 questions in QA in CAT 2015. If the same number is repeated and if you can manage to get around half of 34 right, you will be at 93–94 percentile.

Be clear on fundamentals
Please check if your fundamentals are clear. Knowing the fundamentals means where you can use a concept and what are the limitations?

Conceptual clarity must
Once you have acquired fundamental knowledge of a concept, next question should be – ‘Do you have conceptual clarity ?’  For example, if 2 and 3 are the roots of a quadratic equation ax2 + bx + c = 0, what is the value of (a+b+c) ?

Answer is - cannot be determined uniquely.

Another one - What will be the LCM of 10, 20 and minus 30? Or, Can I call (-2) (minus 2) an even integer? Can I use unitary method in directly proportional relations or inversely proportions relations?

Avoid and Analyse mistakes
If you are a good student but do not consider yourself in the category of excellent ones, you are the best as IIMs will welcome good learners. There are many 95 to 100 percentilers in CAT who come from above average institutes and do not belong to IIT category or have high academic scores in the range of 95 and above yet they have been offered admission by top rated IIMs and other B-schools.

But if you think that you are mistake proof, think again! You have to avoid making silly mistakes and to know what mistakes you have made, you need to analyse after attempting a practice exercise and must remove them as early as possible.

Steps to analyse your mistakes

-- On an average, how many questions do you get wrong because you read 'must' at the place of 'can'? Many a time, we skip the words, and that results in error.

-- Wrong assumptions - You went ahead with only one set of values to check your answer, without realizing that there could be another possibility. For example, if length of a rectangle is increased by 20%, and breadth is increased by 10%, what is the percentage change in perimeter?

-- Did you get 15% or 16.66%?

-- Answer is - cannot be determined because percentage is not a function of addition or subtraction. Perimeter has a plus sign in it.

Get ready for more Practice

-- Once you have taken care of the above points, then comes the need of Practice. This one is most significant after the above points. Remember that even Tendulkar used to go for a net practice before every match. It’s not that he was not aware of a batting type, but practice keeps you alert.

-- Practice upon Quality Questions which are NON-REPETITIVE in nature

-- Get a good book for LRDI, and solve 4–5 sets (i.e. 20 questions everyday). In my book (Logical Reasoning and Data Interpretation for the CAT, 5th edition), you will find how to approach a question in DI as well as LR. There are questions at Foundation, Moderate and Advanced levels with solutions and explanations.

-- Start reading a good newspaper / non- fiction novels. This will help you get a good hold in RC. In any case, questions from Verbal Logic like Para Jumble and CR are quite logical in nature, and you can learn the tactics to solve those questions easily. You may use the book – Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension for the CAT (3rd edition). This covers all the components of Verbal Section of CAT (and other B- School exams like SNAP, XAT etc) – English Usage, Verbal Logic and Reading Comprehension.

Understand and practice as per CAT 2016 exam pattern
CAT 2016 is the mandatory entrance exam for admission to management programmes conducted by IIMs. The exam is going to be conducted by Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore in association with partnering testing agency TCS. CAT 2016 will be a computer based test (CBT) of 3 hours duration and will be held on December 4, 2016.

CAT 2016 exam will be divided in 3 sections namely VARC; DILR and Quant. Total questions in CAT 2016 may not exceed 100 or they may be even less as IIM Bangalore has not yet announced the test size.

-- Each question in CAT 2016 would carry equal weightage of 3 marks.

-- The questions will be of MCQ and Non-MCQ type.

-- Only MCQs type questions will carry 1/3 negative marking for each wrong answer while there will be no negative marking for Non-MCQs.

Expert Advisory
The calculation of percentile in CAT is different and is based on equated normalization system. A candidate with high percentile of 99 in Quant section and with low percentile of 93 in Verbal and DILR sections may still score 99+ percentile. On the contrary a candidate with fairly high balanced percentile of 87 and 90 in each section can have overall percentile between around 95.

The irony however, is that the candidate with 99 percentile with too much deviation in sectional, percentile may not be shortlisted for GDPI by older IIMs as against the candidate with 96 percentile with balanced sectional percentile despite having an excellent academic profile and good work experience. Even a candidate with 92 percentile (having balanced and fairly high percentile) with good academic and work ex profile may get shortlisted by one of the older IIMs like IIM Indore; IIM Kozhikode; IIM Shillong among others.

CAT 2016 Preparation expert on Verbal Ability Prof S K Agarwal is of the strong view that ‘candidates should target a high percentile in both the sections of CAT 2016 exam else it will be difficult to even get shortlisted by any IIM’.

Related Article

CAT 2016: 'Target TITA questions first'; IIMU student & CAT topper Harshit Goswami shares success mantra

CAT 2016 Registration: Why you dont need to rush but avoid last few days

CAT 2016: Dont skip any topic - may slide behind; devise plan to practice on each one

CAT 2016: VARC may get more weightage; dont expect equal sectional scoring pattern

CAT 2016: Sectional score cut off balancing - a big gamble; how to maintain, advises CAT topper

CAT 2016: Calculator more time consuming; success mantra from IIM K Student & CAT topper Amritansh

CAT 2016: Mystery of not disclosing size of exam; 3 hints shared by CAT exam convener on the structure

CAT 2016: Synchronize sectional preparation; low score in any section will vanish your efforts

Stay tuned to MBAUniverse.com for more updates on CAT 2016