Common Admission Test is the premiere management entrance test in India to secure admission to top B-Schools in the country. How should a candidate go about preparing for CAT?
At the outset, I'll make one thing clear! preparation should be candidate-specific. There are probably people out there who might have scored more than 99.90 percentile without preparation and others who might have had to prepare very hard to reach 95. You know yourself best, so you should personalise your preparation-just like what finance folk say about personalising personal finance.
Now, How can you personalise your preparation?
You have to start with gauging where you stand vis~a~vis CAT. You have to determine your strengths and weaknesses. Mock Tests can help you here. Maybe you might like to get a lay of the land before financially investing in anything. A lot of coaching institutions provide solved and unsolved past papers of CAT. 2IIM has a treasure trove of questions while Career Launcher (and others as well) provide access to some 1-3 mocks for free (or at least used to).
You'd be in a better position to decide what to do after this step. Don't be disheartened if your score is bad. People have worked themselves out from very low scores - you will see a lot of examples on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
The next step is to determine the course of action. You'd probably have a lot of questions. Coaching or Self-Preparation? Should you play to your strengths or work on your weaknesses? Which mock series or coaching institution? and so on...
Well, I won't answer the last part, because I believe that different people might have different results with different coaching providers. Different faculty might have different strengths and styles. Similarly, you might have heard people say that mock series x is known to be good for verbal or quant or some section.
Now, I'll try answering the questions one by one.
Should you join a coaching provider or prepare by yourself?
How well are you doing now, for CAT in general? How is your performance across different sections? Do you think you can fill your gaps by yourself with practice? Do you think there are any topics where you might need help to improve your conceptual clarity? Think about the answers to these questions.
Story Time!
I wrote my first CAT in my final year of engineering. It's a different story that I couldn't fully invest in it. that year. I read a lot of answers on Quora by toppers which gave me the impression that practising mocks without attending coaching is the way to go. The posts kind of said that the syllabus is basic and one just needs to practice to improve.
I was naive and believed that without thinking about it in my context. I would have benefitted from some coaching, which would have strengthened concepts in my mind. It would have also given some structure and discipline to my preparation, which was haphazard.
I ended up preparing in an unstructured way. Moreover, I did not recognise my weak point (DILR) nor did I create a realistic strategy to write the exam. My exam was a disaster! I scored low in DILR and Quant. I got an acceptable percentile by scoring high (99.48) in VARC, my strong area. So, when I decided to write CAT again seriously in 2021, I opted for coaching. I was able to significantly improve my score in the DILR section leading to a good overall percentile.
The key thing was identifying my weak area i.e. DILR and working on it. I spent nearly half my time preparing for DILR and half on Quants. I kept aside just some time to read long-form articles for VARC. This might not work if you are scoring lower in the verbal ability section for example. That is why I said, Personalise it!
You should similarly think about where you stand and make an educated guess on attending coaching or not. Another thing I would like to add is that attending coaching would expose you to alternative and more intuitive ways of solving questions, which would help in improving your speed and conceptual clarity.
Now, Should you stick to your strengths or work on your weaknesses? It, again, depends.
The marginal improvement you can get out of your strong area is lower since you are already doing well there. You need to be somewhat good in all sections. This is because it is harder to get a good overall score with a very low score in one of the sections. Moreover, most B-Schools have minimum sectional cut-offs.
I'd recommend working on your weaknesses so that your performance improves to at least an average or above-average level of proficiency. It's alright if it is slightly below average if you can't help it. In those cases, improving your score in your stronger sections is also important.
However, don't be disappointed if you are scoring low in a section despite a lot of work. If nothing works, there are some B-Schools that don't have sectional cutoffs. They are very few in number though, so I wouldn't recommend this if you can improve your performance. Otherwise, you'd be eliminating your prospects at a large number of B-Schools.
Simply put, the idea is to maximise your overall score by maximising your sectional scores. You can do this in a variety of ways. If you don't know already, the 80, 85, 90, and even 95 percentile sectional scores are very low in comparison to the 99 or 99.5 values.
You should work at least hard enough so that you can clear the sectional cutoffs, which are between 70-85 percentile for each section in most B-Schools. The rest of your efforts should be spent on maximising your overall score using a strategy you think would work best. Use mocks to test your strategies and polish them.
I'd like to end with a note of caution. Don't spend too much time strategising. CAT might throw a googly and your strategy might go out the window if, say, your strong section is harder for a particular year. That is why it's recommended to at least achieve a baseline level of proficiency in each section so that they will help in increasing your overall score. Don't rely too much on one section.
If you check my profile page, you'll see that I scored lower in CAT 2020 than in CAT 2019. This was because I was consciously banking on the VARC section that year. I tried solving all questions in VARC even when I found it hard that year, resulting in a much lower score. I am not trying to say that banking on one section is bad or attempting all questions in VARC is bad (I did that in CAT 2021 in which I did well), but everything has its pros and cons, and spreading your risks and returns is always a more intelligent choice, just like portfolio diversification is in finance!
I wish you all the best in your CAT endeavour!
Devarsh A
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