My MBA Journey- Part 5 (Strategy for 2nd CAT attempt)

After deciding that I would take the CAT again, I had to come up with a plan to prepare for CAT 2008 which was just over 3 months away. This time aorund,I had the luxury of CAT 2007 and GMAT experience(which I had taken barely few days ago).

I believe every CAT aspirant is weak in some areas and strong in others and so the preparation strategy would change based on the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
Two common mistakes which many candidates make while preparing/taking CAT are:
1) Blindly following the approach/strategy of a candidate who has already been successful in cracking the CAT in the past
2) Sticking to a FIXED strategy to solve any format of the CAT exam (CAT conductors change the exam format practically every year which takes majority of CAT takers with surprise .FYI…In GMAT format is fixed )

In CAT 2008 though I did not commit the first mistake, I was not lucky to have not committed the second one. My strategy was to devote equal time to all the 3 sections in the CAT paper irrespective of the number of questions, difficult level of the questions etc. and this cost me 3 IIM calls. Because CAT 2008 had 25, 25 and 40 questions (40 in English); it was needed to devote more time to English section vis-à-vis DI and Quant.

So 2 cents of advice to all the CAT aspirants “Listen to successful CAT candidates but form your own strategy which should be customizable at the run time depending on the format of the paper”

Now coming back to how I prepared for the exam.
Though everyone knows it but still I want to re-iterate the golden rule : The better your preparation is, the better would be the results.
Keeping in mind that I did not have the luxury of ample time, I followed the following approach:

1) I ensured to take mock CAT every Sunday (TIME coaching tests are the best followed by Career Launcher followed by IMS) and analyze the answers of each and every question in the paper irrespective of whether I attempted the question or not. This had helped me in
a) knowing the method to solve a question which I could not solve during the exam time
b) understanding the correct way to solve a question which I had incorrectly solved
c) learning the better /faster way to solve a question which I had correctly solved
d) and most important of all : Designing a strategy to improve the sectional and overall score
2) As I was aware that my weakest area was English and strongest was DI, I spent maximum time preparing English followed by Quant followed by DI
3) Did not do any coaching though used both the Career Launcher’s and TIME material to prepare on my own. I personally feel going to coaching for preparation is a waist of time. These coaching institutes provide very good material and anyone could study on his own.
FYI…. Career Launchers’ material is better than TIME’s in terms of content but TIME’s material is more organized and hence I read some chapters from TIME’s and some from Career Launcher’s books
4) Made sure to study around 6-8 hrs per week initially and then increased the time to 10-12 hrs per week towards closer to the exam date.

I followed the said approach and kept on taking mock CATs. Scores in mock CAT used to vary drastically and I could not see any pattern among the scores of various weeks. My percentile ranged from 89 to 99+ in 3 months but every single time the bottleneck used to be English. Hence I was pretty clear that English would be the deciding factor in the real exam and it turned out to be the same.

On the 3rd Sunday of November, I was yet again face to face with the monster .I came back home after riding the Tiger, in the evening checked the answers of Quant and DI but did not have the courage to check English answers .Still I was pretty sure that I had goofed up big time in English and left everything to destiny.

Now I had 2 mammoth tasks again awaiting me:
1) Long wait till 9th January 2009 when the results of CAT would be out
2) International b-school applications’ preparation

And so I continued once again on my long journey…………….