Get your strategy right for CAT

Hyderabad: Preparing for the Common Admission Test (CAT) is a difficult task for several students, particularly in Covid-19 times with educational institutions and coaching centres closed. But with a right strategy in place, one can make the cut in the examination.

The CAT 2020 for admissions into Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) is scheduled to be held on November 29. The exam comprises three sections-Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension, Data Interpretation (DI) and Logical Reasoning, and Quantitative Ability.

The coaching experts say that CAT has traditionally been a reading comprehension centric paper, for English. Five passages have been appearing in the recent CATs with four to five questions per passage. In order to answer these questions, students should read diverse topics besides targeting all direct questions followed by partially inferential questions.

In the verbal ability section, the aspirants, according to coaching experts, should identify the introductory statement and later identify links that would connect two sentences. The candidates need to spend at least an hour daily on regular reading and another 30 minutes reading the passages from various online sources.

As each section is allotted 60 minutes, selective preparation according to experts is risky as one may end up getting questions from the areas that he/she has left out of preparation.

“Till the last 3-4 weeks running up to the exam, the students should focus on getting better on all the topics in Quant. Then the focus should be shifted to concentrating on specific areas which would give them the maximum return for their time,” said Ramnath Kanakadandi, national CAT course director, T.I.M.E

To master the quantitative ability section, understanding the basic concepts of the selected topic is the key beside one needs to write down all the formulae and their usages. The students need to solve at least 30 to 40 questions of the CAT level from the topic.

In the logical reasoning section, experts say questions on puzzles have been most common followed by Venn Diagrams. Puzzle books like those by Shakuntala Devi, George Summers etc. would provide exposure to high-level logic puzzles.

The ability to analyse and understand difficult/complicated data besides calculating quickly are key skills that candidates need to acquire to answer questions in DI section.

“This is a skill which one can acquire through regular practice. The practice needs to involve questions of various difficulty levels and types. One approach will be to start solving all the DI sets from the study material. Once this is done, it is time to move online using online practice tests,” said Ramnath Kanakadandi said.

Now you can get handpicked stories from Telangana Today on Telegram everyday. Click the link to subscribe.

Click to follow Telangana Today Facebook page and Twitter .