How To Prepare For CAT Exam? Devise The Best CAT Preparation Strategy -By Nitish P Nair, 99.67 percentile, IIM Bangalore

Meet Nitish P Nair, who did not get demotivated on scoring 93.7 percentile in his first attempt at the CAT exam (2015) and worked harder for his second attempt. Scoring a 99.67 percentile speaks volumes about his dedication and smart approach. Let’s learn from his experience and gain insights into how to prepare for CAT exam and build an effective CAT preparation strategy. 

I could dedicate only 90-100 days for CAT preparation i.e. approx 3 months. During these days I wasn't just studying, I was working also. I worked with the Indian railways as a locomotive maintenance engineer which happened to be a 6-day/week work and demanded around 11-12 hours of my day. So I had around 2-3 hours a day during weekdays and the whole of Sunday for my CAT preparation.  

How To Prepare For CAT Exam Undeterred By Challenges

Since my job was related to live train operations, we had to be on our toes. Unfortunately, a lot of live issues came up during my 3-month preparation period and consumed 8 of my 12 odd Sunday week-offs in the prep period. Also, I had to travel frequently thus making it very difficult to balance CAT preparation with work.

However, I decided to work on my CAT preparation strategy in an organized and focused manner. To begin with, I analyzed my strengths and weaknesses and worked on them accordingly. My strength was the DILR section and my weakness was the QA section. I targeted to score well in DILR by preferring to solve the LR sets over the DI ones. Further in QA, I hardly used to score 20-30 in the mocks initially but later on, I worked hard to select questions that were of easy and medium difficulty. I made sure that I attempted a decent number of questions and tried to ensure a 90-100 % accuracy. My target for the D-day was to attempt somewhere around 18-25 questions depending upon the difficulty of the exam and ended up attempting 20 with 19 questions being correct in QA.

Mocks Tests: The Backbone Of CAT Preparation Strategy

The first thought for most aspirants when wondering about how to prepare for CAT exam is to take coaching. But I did not take coaching, and instead enrolled for around 20 mock CAT exams from TIME. I used to diligently write these exams and analyze them thoroughly. This was ideally the whole backbone of my CAT preparation strategy. Apart from mock exams, I went through a few free online videos of Cracku to get conceptual clarity for quantitative aptitude.

So all in all, TIME mocks and Cracku online free videos by Ms. Sayali Kale were my only resources. I would endorse both of these resources to future candidates wondering about how to start preparing for CAT, as they were very helpful.TIME mocks did a great job in modeling DILR and QA sections to near perfection while doing a good job in the VARC section. Cracku videos on geometry and the total quant summary videos were very helpful in brushing up on concepts and also for revision.

The Best CAT Preparation Strategy Is Subjective

There is no single perfect CAT preparation strategy, that is, there is no one size that fits all. The best CAT preparation strategy must be devised on the basis of one’s strengths and weaknesses, time availability, and method of study. But there are a few essential things a candidate must do that are of prime importance. They are- to take mocks seriously and analyze them even more seriously. 

As they say "It's better to sweat in practice than to bleed in the war", ideally we should try and test all our strategies in mocks and find the best one which suits us. Mocks also help us prepare for the 3-hour fatigue the examination could give us. So I would suggest candidates to first write a mock and see how they fare in it. And then based on the results tailor a strategy for themselves, which subsequently gets amended in portions after every mock analysis. This is how one can build a perfect CAT preparation strategy.

Verdict: I got calls from IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, IIM Indore and CAP, FMS, MDI,  IIFT, XLRI (BM & HRM). I was able to convert all the calls except for FMS (waitlisted as no interviews were conducted this year). And I will be finally joining IIM Bangalore.

Nitish's CAT preparation strategy worked perfectly for him, read about a few others who managed to bell the CAT:

1. Who said only engineers can be the CAT toppers? -By Abhilasha Balakrishnan, 99.86 percentile, CAT 2020
   
2. CAT 2020 topper interview: This is how Shivam Chandak scored 100 percentile in DILR, 99.98 overall!
   
3. The Journey from Cancer to CAT- How did I grab a coveted seat in IIM - By Aishwarya Rao from IIM Amritsar
4. This 22 Year Old IIT Bombay Lad Scores 99.99 Percentile in CAT 2021 in First Attempt