How CAT Coaching Helped Me To Score 99.35 Percentile - By Divij Kishore Jain, IIM Ahmedabad

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Divij managed CAT preparation along with a finance internship and extra-curricular activities. He scored an excellent score of 165.84 in the exam. Let’s dig in to learn from his success story and how CAT coaching helped him to attain an overall percentile of 99.35 with a 99.85 percentile in VARC in his first attempt.

I took CAT coaching and dedicated 7 months to preparing for the exam. I started my preparation unaware of CAT, as I am the first in my family to do so. Apart from guiding me about the exam, my CAT coaching center helped me discover my purpose for doing an MBA. Also, the material, and especially the mocks and their analysis helped me prepare in a holistic manner. Regularly scheduled pan-India mock tests and discussions on the same helped me finalize a test-taking strategy. Lastly, I was also given constant updates about which tests to register for and informed about the colleges that would be right for me.

Take mocks for a good reality-check

The LRDI section in particular was quite confusing at the beginning. Since VARC and QA had topics I'd seen before, they didn't seem daunting. However, LRDI was a completely new topic and it initially seemed too hard to tackle. But after attempting a few mocks, I realized my strength is VARC and also the fact that LRDI and QA are the sections I needed to work on. My strategy was to target the highest possible score in VARC and ensure that I steadily increase my score in the other 2 sections. My preparation didn't get affected due to this, however, I gave equal time to all three sections until the end, since all three presented opportunities to maximize my score.

Resources that helped me sail through the ructions

I heavily relied on my CAT coaching material, as they covered most of the topics. For VARC, I picked up a habit of reading the editorials of The Hindu religiously. This also helped me with my GK. 

Another great resource was the mocks I had. Apart from my coaching institute, I took another test series from a different institute. These mocks gave me access to a great question bank, which proved to be ample. I ensured that I was able to attempt any question that I couldn't solve during the mock, and saved different types of questions for future reference.

The winning strategy

Cracking CAT isn't about scoring 100% marks, but picking the right questions and achieving high accuracy. Applying this thinking to all sections also stumbled me, since up till that point the concept of percentiles was alien to me.

After experimenting by taking 30+ mocks, I formed different strategies for all 3 sections. In general, I always tried to stay calm and composed and tried to not let one section's performance affect the other. Specifically,

For VARC, I attempted all questions in order. As this section was my strength, I attempted most of the questions. I tried to reduce the time taken per question by reading the passage thoroughly once and then answering the following questions.

For LRDI, I chose my questions before attempting any. I took 5-7 minutes to glance through all the questions and mark all easy/medium difficulty sets. I went from the easiest to the toughest, in order to build momentum.

For QA, I again attempted the question in order, however, I made sure that if I'm not confident about the right approach, I would leave that question and move ahead. Only after reaching the last question, I went back to the questions I hadn't attempted.

Verdict:  I got calls from IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Lucknow, IIM Kozhikode, IIM Indore, IIM Shillong, all baby IIMs and MDI Gurgaon. I converted IIM Ahmedabad, baby IIMs and MDI Gurgaon. I am currently waitlisted by all others. I will be joining IIM Ahmedabad this year.