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Education Update: With about just a little more than 2 months to go for the CAT exam, it is high time for all those serious about sailing through to the IIMs to change gears in preparation.
For some of the students, they would be wondering whether they have it in them to make it through the CAT exam after the initial set of mocks that they have taken.
However, if you can identify your weak areas and spend focused effort improving on them, the CAT will turn out to be far less of a challenge compared to how difficult it may appear.
Let us take up each area of the CAT and see how one can work on them before the CAT.
Reading Comprehension: CAT traditionally, has been an RC-driven paper for English. Recent CATs had 4 passages containing around 20 Qs. There could be surprises, but the count this year is likely to be similar too. A couple of important things in RC preparation:
Reading on various topics regularly and trying to analyze the logic or arguments presented in the passage.
Spent additional 5-10 min after reading the topic/passage in summarizing the reading. This helps in making us concentrate on various essential aspects-trying to identify the tone, inferences, assumptions, assertions etc. which, when done for an RC passage, will be of great help in answering the questions better-both faster and with more accuracy.
During the Test Ideally, not more than 8-10 minutes should be spent on each passage, and it must be ensured that all passages are looked at
Target all direct questions first followed by partially inferential questions .
Choose the passages which are closest to one’s comfort area in terms of topic and style of writing
Verbal Ability: Para Formation, para-oddman-out questions, para-summary questions have been appearing in the exam for some time. Sentence placement is a relatively new question types that appeared in CAT.
There are a few ways of answering these questions:
Identify the introductory statement (this statement would tell us what the paragraph is all about)
Then identify the links that would connect the two sentences. These are called connectives. These connectives can be conjunctions (but, and) or can be content connectives like cause-effect, generic to specific etc.
The other types of questions not used for quite a while include para-completion questions, Critical Reasoning Questions, and grammar and word-based questions. While these are not particularly relevant to CAT, for people who are not too strong on the subject of English, some practice on such question types would also enhance the foundation in English altogether.
Similarly, while no direct grammar-based questions are being seen in CAT, having a good grip on the aspects of grammar would help the students with better comprehension and language-related reasoning.
Similarly, something similar would be true about vocabulary also. A good grip on vocabulary would increase the reading speed and save valuable time for the students, and they could ask more questions. But the time available does not seem sufficient for focused vocab-building. It is, therefore suggested that students do not spend any specific time on building their vocab, but pay attention to any new words they come across while preparing for VARC and make an effort to note them down separately to remember.
Just remember that there is no shortcut to learn a language except practice. So, practice makes this section a success. Read at least an hour daily through regular reading and then another 30 minutes through reading passages from various online sources.
All the best!!
