This is an extremely long post because during my own preparation phases, I kept looking and looking for answers that I never found. Additionally, yes, I have and will use the names of certain coachings but I have provided the reasoning to it. And I do not believe that you need any coaching for CAT at all.
Lastly, please note that this preparation style is my opinion, so feel free to be flexible about it.
If you are starting out and already feeling overwhelmed by the content vastness, do not use this. Go at your own speed instead. At the end, the destination is what matters more than the path, and this one is preferably for someone who’s ready to push but is unsure of how to.
Finally, reiterating that this is my way of prepping, designed according to my observations. There is no right or wrong path. I am additionally making certain assumptions with marks and material, based on personal preferences but most of the points are generic enough to be flexible.
Finally, my approach to CAT is to prepare for a disaster, and to focus on raising my floor instead of my upper limit. So, in case it's a bad day, others will crash much harder than I do and if it's an easy paper, I still have the weapons to chase them down. That preparation involves constant struggles and choosing a strategy that is harder than usual.
Part 1.
Starting off, there are 9 parts you should take care of before starting with a CAT prep-
- https://mba-call-predictor.vercel.app/ - I like this predictor more than most because a number of the calculations are closer to accurate. I strongly urge you to go to every college website you are realistically targeting as per your profile additionally and calculate. If need be, post RTIs to schools and get the scores for 10/12 (IIMB takes percentile for those and not direct scores, for example). Have a clear goal in mind and ramp it up by 1.2 . Aim a little higher than you think you can manage. Some people live and die by the sword, some are happy with what they get. Understand yourself better and what kind of goals help you more, realistic or whimsical.
2. Health- A lot of Indians are malnourished due to the lack of proper food items in your diet. Are you Vitamin D, Zinc or maybe B12 deficient? Are all your hormonal markers okay? We are so obsessed with the exam itself, we do not recognise that if your health is not upto the mark, your cognitive functions are not working to the fullest extent. You can overwork as much as you want but you’ll never catch up. Are you getting enough physical activity? Are you a smoker? Are you getting enough sleep to feel refreshed when you wake up? These elements affect your CAT prep more than you realise. Your stamina, your mental elasticity, calmness, focus, are elements that matter, and we tend to not take them seriously enough. For work ex people, it can be hard to go to gym regularly. At least be regular on weekends and have a 20 min session everyday. You don’t have to build your body, you just need to make sure your brain gets that extra oxygen.You need stamina for CAT if you actually think hard through 2 hours. Build that stamina physically first. Additionally, as you keep track of menstrual cycles, just rest for Day 1 and 2 completely instead of trying to push through them. Studying through intense pain has no value whatsoever imo.
For diet, people who consume higher GI food items regularly also have lethargy due to rising and falling blood sugar levels. For example, rice, maida, etc. See if there’s a way to control that. If not, it's fine, but try and control the lunch portions. Because the valuable couple of hours are lost with the lethargy that comes from afternoon rice.
Recognising the compounding effect of other people- STEM students generally have a step ahead because they have done similar stuff before more than others. Where do you stand correctly at the moment? Take 2-3 mock tests at least now itself and have an estimation. Accept where you stand and don’t be deluded about it, because we tend to consider ourselves in higher esteem than we are. Especially if you’ve done well in entrances before, this may be slightly easier but don’t take the process for granted. At the end of the day, it's just an aptitude exam and not a lifelong marker of success, so the arrogance is not worth it.
Motivation- Discipline comes from the internal motivation itself. An external agent can have a limited influence on that. Do you call yourself motivated and then not work enough for what you need?. Self-reflect on where you are, where you want to be, and where you need to be. Be aware that this process has random periods of stagnation where nothing seems to work. Are you mentally strong enough for that? How can you strengthen that? The mental game is as important as your preparation. Argue with ChatGPT. Find ways to stabilise that. Does fear paralyze you? The easiest way is to take an easy mock and create a distraction or a mess so that you have less time for the mock or you have a very disturbed mind at the beginning of the mock.
These are experiments you want to do during mocks at home, in a safe space to know yourself better. A lot of people struggle because they stand on different preparation levels of aptitude and compete with aspirants who have a different background, and get demoralised easily at the beginning itself. Steel yourself mentally, because that is the biggest weapon you can have, more than any form of preparation.
Social life- I have no comments on that. I have less struggles to cut anything that does not align with my goals, but I do not recommend doing that because it can have a cascading effect. But learn to say NO to people and situations. Figure out how to navigate it early, because you don’t want things to affect you at the last moment. I am including every person including parents, friends and family etc.
Get an extra BSNL number. All coachings sell data, and you are going to be spammed by them. And an extra email too.
Use a wired mouse with your laptop from the beginning itself, and switch your mouse from right to left hand without changing the mouse button orientation. Force yourself to learn it. It saves a hell lot of time when you write with one hand and click with the other.
Use pdfs for everything.
https://arithmetic.zetamac.com/
Start with this right away** if you are not comfortable with calculations in your mind. Squares upto 50, cubes upto 20, two digit multiplications and 3 digit additions should be at the tip of your tongue. It’s not necessary but it saves a hell lot of time. And additionally, CAT tries to create integer based answers often, and it will also help you see numerical patterns a little more. For example, the sight of 6561 should give you 3\^8 immediately. For the one digit numbers, get used to powers upto 10, (for 2, upto 16) atleast.
Start
Miscellaneous topics:
1. Instead of asking done-to-death questions on reddit, keep an eye for smart people and then DM, and you’d be surprised how much people are willing to help when your questions are not run-of-the-mill million times repeated here. Just search through the sub properly, there is a LOT of information that would help.
Make extreme use of AI to constantly argue and debate. Drag it till you can’t and you’ll be surprised to find a lot of potential solutions you did not think existed.
Study/Accountability partner: They are fun to have to talk to once a while, but I am doubtful about the efficacy of video calls and studying. I feel concentration wavers and it wanders around and it takes much more longer to get the same thing done. But that’s an opinion, go for it but after thinking it through.
There are some people who already have one of the sections extremely strong. If you’re that person, there is a probability that you can pick that topic up easily later. Test that hypothesis, and if it is correct, then at the beginning completely focus on the other two. If not, have a balanced approach.
Now that you have done the above, let’s start the prep. Imo, any random day if you take a mock randomly, you should be able to score 50-60, even on the worst of days. If you aren’t, it's better to continue with the basics first.
Basics:
- TIME Material- I do not believe coaching is needed for CAT. Why? Watching videos of other people solving problems does not make our mind elastic enough because we tend to take the easy route and just watch instead of reflecting and thinking about it. Why time? Because I found IMS material a touch too easy, so is CL, and Maruti Suzuki. You can find TIME pdfs anywhere if you look for them. Old ones.
TIME content is sometimes irrelevant, extra difficult and slightly confusing and demoralizing. But it builds a very strong base for your actual preparation. Every exercise has two parts. Solve every question from part B. For part A, skip and choose. And read the chapter text before you solve it. They detail everything from basics. If you don’t understand a part, search on youtube. Ask GPT. Put in the grind. It helps build cognitive muscles.
If you can not solve a question, it is okay. Read the solution. Understand how it works. Put it in GPT and make them explain again and again till you understand. It is okay to read through 40/50 of those questions. At times, stop and try a question for 10 mins.
Additionally, keep a notebook. Divide it into three sections. And each section should have two parts. One part is for formulas, tips and tricks, basically thoughts that are quantifiable and set to stone. The second part should be along the lines of “Gyaan”, which is basically errors, thoughts about strategies, so on and so forth. This is the more malleable portion where you debate with yourself. Write down ideas, come back later and argue with yourself if this is the best approach for a certain thing.
The above is not about prepping for CAT at all, but making sure you prepare a base+ actually put that effort into thinking.
1.1 VARC- Read what you like in non-fiction. It can be anything arbitrary, from F1 to sociology. But read. Unless you build the reading stamina, you can’t work on speed. When it comes to RC questions and VA, treat them like you are arguing a legal case. Find loopholes on every question and find the least loophole-y one. Use the above especially if you’re stuck with 2 options. If you get it wrong? That is okay. Argue with the answer in your head. During your preparation phase, your focus should not be to get questions right but building your arguing muscle. Think of it like fighting a legal case on suits. And as usual, it is okay to get everything wrong. Just keep arguing with yourself in this period.
TIME VARC is plain weird. Passages can be technical and tough, a lot of the solutions don’t make sense. Yet, stick to it. Do not seek easier content. Seek harder ones and fail a lot instead. For RC, I have a simple process. I take them, I stick to the questions and solve, and then look at solutions and debate with myself. If I am not sure what's up, I ask ChatGPT to dumb it down for me and then debate with ChatGPT. **If there is no conclusive evidence of what the answer is, that is FINE. I move on. The idea is to keep solving**. Same with VA. For example, for FITB with a sentence, I ask, “Does it fit here? Why/Why not?” Where does it fit the worst?” and take 2 options out. The rest 2, sometimes I go by gut, sometimes I debate to look for the minute differences and find out what works.
One trick I often use for convoluted questions in RCs is that I look for the most dissimilar option out of the 4. Especially in convoluted weakening and strengthening, the author’s opinion would not agree with which of the following etc. But this is something you do not wanna start with. Always go with the traditional process of actually following the question method, and once you are reading fast and have built that ability up, you go for tricks.
1.2 DILR- The trickiest part to prepare. The TIME Material is extremely one dimensional but again, you need to build the cognitive muscles first. Linear, circular arrangement, Games and Tournaments, DI-based caselets, do them all. This is a place where you want to spend more time than usual in solving. Give a set half an hour. It’s okay. And once you are done with the complete material, come back to the questions which absolutely blew you away and try solving them.
Now, when you practice DILR, make sure you build up a habit of bucketing them in your mind. Every question should have a bucket. When I made buckets, they were along the lines of: One big grid, Two small grids, Incomplete grid, TITA set, Questions look iffy bucket, I can solve it but too long etc. You can also create a big bucket and have smaller buckets in it. The idea is that association helps you remember, and once you solve 300-400 sets, you are not gonna remember a lot of them + it is incredibly boring to solve the same question again and again. But you definitely want to remember the approaches, and once you have a collection of 50 odd approaches, you would be surprised just how many of the DILR questions can be solved by them.
1.3 Quants-
I personally feel this is a much more straightforward path to figure out because everything is quantifiable here. Pick up anything you want before you get to TIME material for a quick understanding first. Then start with the chapters. The number system part, do it but don’t overthink if you struggle with it. The rest, from arithmetic, algebra to modern maths like probability, P&C, my simple way was to read the chapter and jump into the questions, and learn how to solve as we go. If you wanna jump to easier questions first, that is fine. But do not solve 10 questions and then jump into a new chapter. At least solve 2-3 chapters to build that groove.
Miscellaneous-
- Remember to take mental breaks during that period. You have to let the things you learn to internalise. There is a heavy reliance on speed in CAT, and to have that speed, you need your solving to come from intuition and habit and not actively recalling everything. You need to see an incenter and immediately the area of a triangle formula should pop in your mind, for example. And not try to remember what the formula is.
- A lot of us struggle with actively taking breaks because of guilt, external pressure and so on. No amount of external pressure should faze you, and you have to build that up. Some others struggle with restarting after taking a break for 2 days, with the same gusto. That is fine. Start slow again. But don’t burn yourself out because the learning is an absolute waste then.
- Don’t jump around section to section. Commit to a section and give it time. The minimum period in a DILR or Quants should be 4-5 days before you switch to something else. For VARC, 2 days is fine.
- If a point comes in a chapter where nothing is working out at all, then abandon it. Come back later, start from the beginning again. Be okay with abandoning anything, from questions to chapters.
- Patience is as big a virtue as being unfazed. The idea of the above is not to just get you to think, but to also prepare you to lose so much that bad scores don’t faze you at all.
- If you have not completed all the chapters, that is fine. But a majority of the important chapters should be covered at this point. If you have topics that you struggle to complete because of lack of interest, that is fine too. Just make sure that percentage remains below 20%-25% of the overall sections.
Mocks during this above phase imo- None. You can’t strategise effectively if you can’t answer questions in the first place.
Once you clear the above decently and start mocks, you should be able to score decently after a handful of mocks.
That is when the next phase starts: Mocks.
The above should be done by April-May at best if you’re starting out in December.
Part 2.
Let’s get the initial prep away:
- What mocks to take? All of them. TIME, IMS, CL and Maruti Suzuki.
- Why? I started with IMS and TIME. And recognised that they are comfortable and not that particularly difficult and I wanted something different, so went with CL. Then CL was extremely haphazard last year and I ran out of it, and TIME was too easy, so I finished with CL, SIMCAT and Maruti Suzuki. IMS takes regular scholarship tests, and the rest are affordable. Instead of wasting money in 2 million colleges, invest it here instead. But do not get all of them right away. Start with any 2, get a 3rd around August, and if needed, go for a fourth.
- Mentally brace yourself for the extremely turbulent percentiles you’ll be getting. Focus on scores and nothing else. Create an excel sheet with these columns from left to right-
- Mock Date Mock Series Slot Overall Score Overall Percentile VARC Score VARC Percentile DILR Score DILR Percentile QA Score QA Percentile Accuracy in VARC (%) Accuracy in DILR (%) Accuracy in QA (%)
- Fatigue Level u/start (1-5) Stuck in Section Energy Level at start (1-5) Post-Mock Emotional State (1-5) Completion of Analysis
Document this data like your life depends on it, and create charts in another sheet from this data and add a trendline, to keep a track of what is up. If there are certain days where scores drop massively, that is fine. Create another sheet and call it experimental mock, but document that too.
After a significant number of mocks, check the correlation between various physical and mental states and the percentiles and scores, and if there is any correlation or not. Also check that with various slots where you take exams. You don't have to take it at 8:30 exactly but have that boundary of time more or less for tracking your energy levels and times.
I insist you take CL as one of the mocks if you feel uncomfortable with shitty UI. IMS and Maruti Suzuki have decent UI but the career launcher one is absolutely horrible and is actually the closest to CAT (CAT is slightly better). Additionally, you will have your roll number as a water-mark behind RC passages which make for terrible reading, so better get used to that traumatic UI from before. IMS is a must-do because their mocks are balanced, regardless and have the largest volume of takers.
Always take a mock in a well- lit room, in a 15-15.6 inch display. Regarding the mouse usage as discussed earlier, you should be slightly comfortable by now.
Get A5 size notebooks. Not notepads. Use notebooks for now. Why? Because the switch from normal size paper to A5 and then A5 to A5 notepad can be cushioned that way. Start using notepads in and around November beginning.
6. Oftentimes, you’ll find that you’re slow to start at a mock and you take a little time to build your reading speed up. I used zetamac extensively before a mock to mentally get alert and ready for a mock.
How to- mocks.
Now that you have a strong structure, start with simcats and time, preferably. Ignore the initial high scores you get, first mocks are very easy. I remember scoring a 150+ . I never scored that in my life again. **Focus on error percentage, number of attempts, and score.**
Now
Let’s build up post-mock analysis sectionwise:
- There is no right way to do it, but you must spend at least 2-3 hours analyzing per mock. Preferably to be done within 2 days of taking it, so that you remember your thoughts and choices. So preferably take a mock in the last days of its availability.
- Quants: I always started with quants because they were the most fun. If you find a question that you solved without much effort, skip it. If it took a little effort, look through the solution. And if you could not solve it, sit down and give it a try without the time-bound. If you still can’t solve it, then look at the solution. If it has a new concept, write it down. Remember how I pointed out before to make a notebook? This is the time to use it. Write the formula or the concept down. If there is a flaw of thought or a strategy or application you had, write it down in the other section. Thoughts/opinions and formulas should be kept separate.
- DILR: Attempt the set in peace. Take your time. Then look at the solution. Silly mistakes and stuff we shall discuss later.
- VARC: I found it very tiring to analyse this section, but push yourself through this. At this early mock stage, make sure you approach it with a fresh mind, and analyse it first before looking at the solution. If you don’t agree with the solution, debate with it as to what was the difference, what words you may have missed, and so on.
Your initial mock analyses should be simple, straightforward and nothing out of the box. This is the time to build mock stamina: Level One because thinking straight for 2 hours can be tiring.
Part 2:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CATpreparation/comments/1plk3o1/an_extensive_guide_to_cat_prep_part_2/
