Since not many days are left for the IIM entrance test, here is a look at an action-oriented strategy to score good marks in CAT 2020.
The Common Admission Test (CAT) is an exam conducted for entry into IIMs and other top management institutes in India. Cracking the CAT is the dream of lakhs of students. With just a few days remaining for CAT 2020, revision is the keyword now. Relook, revisit all the concepts learnt so far and more importantly try to identify the ways in which you have made mistakes in the mocks taken so far. The more one knows about one’s mistakes, the better one becomes. Learn from the wrong answers you have marked and take the corrective measures. That’s the demand for the next few days left for the CAT entrance exam. So, being action-oriented is the key and the remaining days should be used very judiciously.
The three broad areas tested in the exam are verbal ability and reading comprehension (VARC), logical reasoning and data interpretation (LRDI), and quantitative ability (QA). As per the recent changes, the time has been reduced to 120 min from 180 min and this demands a strategy change from the students preparing as per the old pattern. This test is definitely about informed decision making rather than wild guesswork. The English section has been mostly reading-based in the past 4-5 years with a focus on reading comprehension, para jumble, summary, and odd man out type questions.
Last year, particularly, was a lot about critical reasoning based questions with words like inference, assumption, least depth, most agree, most invalidate, except, etc. used in RC questions. So, one has to practice at least 2-3 passages daily and work a lot on CR type questions. These are clearly skill-based questions and the aspirants need to practice a lot of questions to reach a good accuracy level.
Verbal ability and reading comprehension
For the English section, one should do a good mix of RC and VA questions regularly. Doing passages, para jumble, para completion, summary, critical reasoning, fill in the blank, should form the basis of the preparation. Vocab building with a bit of focus on idioms and phrases should be done every day without fail. Basic grammar rules should be learned and practiced once in a while.
There is no fixed distribution of RC topics so one cannot neglect any topic/ area during the preparation. The passages and paras can be from areas like philosophy, politics, psychology, history, biology, economics, literature, etc. A good number of questions may come from the neglected topic/area in your CAT slot. So, a selective preparation strategy is very risky.
While doing passages develop a habit of writing summary, title, important points, etc. Understand different genres of passages and try to work on comfort level and the reading speed gather the words picked up during general reading and note it down with the meaning and usage. A good vocabulary is definitely a key to better reading. Though the focus in the next few days should be more on the RC practice than just reading articles and novels.
