How to prepare for CAT without coaching? -By Apeksha Gupta, 97.7 percentile, IIM Lucknow

Anyone who is reading this article can get into premier B-School even if one prepares for CAT without coaching. How? Let’s pour in to find an answer.

I started my preparation for CAT 2019 in August 2019. I only had 120 days before CAT. After my poor performance in CAT 2018 and an unfulfilling job, I decided to look out for a better job role before preparing again. Eventually, that happened and I took time to settle into my new job in a US-based company and began my preparation soon after. 

My preparation would mostly depend on the office meeting timings, but this seemed like a minor hiccup towards my end goal and I adjusted my study times accordingly and got used to it. I did enroll in a coaching institute near my home for their weekend batches with the hopes of getting certain concepts cleared and doubt solving. But, my purpose was not solved as there was no permanent faculty for doubt solving and other reasons. I had to turn to Facebook groups for doubt solving and resources available on the internet. So, my advice to the future aspirants would be to self-study. Nothing beats that. You can prepare for CAT without coaching too. There are a lot of free and paid resources available on the internet. You can join a coaching if you feel the need but it's not at all the only way to crack CAT.

The struggle of confronting challenges

The first time I gave CAT (2018), I thought I would easily sail through VA. But boy, I was wrong. The ability to distinguish between two seemingly similar options was hard and required extensive practice. Another thing was time management, squeezing time out from each day. So I,

• Watched QA concept videos while commuting to and from office
• Solved a few questions on those concepts at night 
• Tried reading newspaper articles during office hours 
• Solved 2 RCs daily with a study group I joined through FB (with serious aspirants) 
• Gave mocks on weekends

I had often been told that CAT is all about playing on your strengths. I tried applying this to myself. Firstly, I identified my strengths with a few mocks and worked on perfecting those. At the same time, I did not completely ignore my weaknesses which were in RCs and some topics of Quant and LR. For those, I stuck to clearing my basics and not mugging up the formulas. I diligently solved at least 1 RC and 1 LR question each day, come what may.

At times, things felt a bit overwhelming, but my family and friends were always there to back me up.

Be wise when it comes to the selection of resources

If you want to prepare for CAT without coaching, there are a lot of free resources available on the internet. RC99/ RC100 PDFs are the holy grail for VA preparation. For LR, I would suggest following the ElitesGrid and MBAInt LRDI series on YouTube. After clearing your basics through these videos, you can solve LR questions from previous years' papers and mocks.

For Quants, you can watch Takshzila videos to clear your basics and then practice questions from any source (Arun Sharma, or any coaching institute's booklets). You can also follow ElitesGrid/ MBAInt channels for some peculiar concepts related to CAT.

And lastly, take mocks and most importantly, analyse them.

Spill the beans! Here’s the secret to success

I would like to highlight 4 key things that helped me to prepare for CAT without coaching, to sail through the exam and to prepare for PIs as well.

Firstly, taking and analysing mocks. There's a consensus that to ace the CAT exam, one must enroll with at least two test series and take umpteen mocks. I don't agree with that. It's not the count that matters but what you learn from the mistakes in those. I took like only 6-7 mocks but diligently re-attempted them without timer and analysed each one of them in the end. It is important to experiment with your test-taking strategies and find the right one that works for you.

Secondly, time management. No matter if you are a student or a working professional, you need to have some timelines to finish your syllabus and take mocks.

Thirdly, It's very important to stay positive throughout the preparation phase. At times when you feel low, talk to your mentors, friends, teachers, or family who has been through this.

Lastly, keeping calm during the exam. It is also important to learn to maintain composure till the end, and not let the performance of one section affect another.

Verdict: I got calls from IIM Lucknow, IIM Kozhikode, IIM Shillong, MDI Gurgaon, IMT Ghaziabad and all the new and baby IIMs. I feel blessed to have converted all of them. (I had not attended the PI rounds of new IIMs which had separate admission process from CAP.) I have decided to join IIM Lucknow for their flagship PGP program.