This is how 99+ percentilers prepare for CAT -By Neha Mota, 99.6 percentile, IIM Bangalore

A graduate in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune, 2017. Thereafter, she worked with Seagate Technology for 22 months. And now, she is a PGP2 student at IIM Bangalore where she has recently interned with Marico Limited during Summer 2020. Read how Neha prepared for CAT and achieved 99.6 percentile in her first attempt.

I was working full-time and was in the second year of my role, so had increased responsibilities then. I started to prepare for CAT seriously in July 2018 (about 5 months before CAT) even though I had joined coaching class in April 2018 and had started giving mocks earlier. Coaching helped me to get an idea about different topics covered across sections and gave me a starting point.

Mocks: Taking a bite of the reality sandwich

I started giving mocks around mid-May which gave me a real understanding of where I stand compared to others, what my weak points are and how I need to develop my strategy. Trying out different strategies during mocks and analyzing them on my own helped me a lot in improving my weak areas and preparing mindset for the final exam.

I was getting good scores at the start (around 93-95%), but towards the July-August period, I was constantly getting marks in the range of 110-115 for about 5-6 tests, which made me nervous. After evaluating, I understood that my VARC was not at all improving, whatever strategy I tried. I worked on that critical reasoning part and improved my score satisfactorily within 2 more tests.

I prepared my strategies according to my strengths and weaknesses and attempted mocks in that way. Instead of running away from my weaknesses and ignoring them (thinking this part will contribute to a very less percentage of the overall section), I worked to improve them through practice and sectional tests.

Prepare for CAT like a pro

Working out strategies in mocks helped me understand how I should handle them in tests. Completely ignoring any weaker topic and focusing all on my strong points was never an option.

I got a scaled score of 170.56 which equated to a 99.6 percentile. As per my sectional percentiles are concerned, in VARC I attained a 98.88 percentile, in DILR I scored 95.92 and it was highest in the QA, i.e. 99.54. This was my very first attempt in 2018. So here are some quick tips that can help you score 99 percentile in CAT:

• Take mocks and do their thorough analysis
• Take advantage of coaching study material
• Solve previous CAT question papers and other open-source question papers
• Delve into newspaper readings
• Read online blogs for getting your hands on a better understanding of RC

For VARC, I had experimented a lot and found out the perfect strategy. Choose the RCs to solve in the first 5-7 minutes. I target solving 3-4 RCs (all those questions I was confident about) in the next 35 minutes, solved the VA section in the next 10 minutes and depending on difficulty and time remaining, I targeted solving one more RC. In the last 20 minutes, I used to shift as per the difficulty of the VA section and my confidence in solving those questions.

In DILR, straightaway select the order in which sets are to be solved after spending 5 min to go through the question paper. Spend a maximum of 5 minutes per set to solve, if you feel stuck move on to the next. Try to pick questions among the sets for which you are confident about answering and solve them. Solve straightforward questions from the remaining sets in the last 5-7 minutes when an entirely new set can't be solved. It was all about time management per set and picking the right questions.

QA was my strongest section and I could immediately estimate the time required after seeing the questions and decide in which round I should solve them. This judgment and strategy developed after practicing through mocks. At the start of the paper, choose 10-15 questions (depending on paper difficulty) to be solved in round 1 ( 30 minutes), choose 10-12 questions to be solved in round 2, select solvable questions from the remaining and rejecting others. This strategy perfectly worked for me in CAT 2018 when Quant was the toughest. And the questions I chose gave me 100% accuracy in the paper.

Do NOT underestimate the post-CAT time

I got calls from all IIMs, FMS, SP Jain (Finance) based on my CAT score. (I hadn't applied to others). Except for IIM Ahmedabad, I converted all the calls and decided to go down with IIM Bangalore.

However, always remember that interview preparation is a major part post-CAT which is usually not much focused until after the results. I personally wasn't quite well prepared for the IIM Ahmedabad interview which was my first one, in early February. And learnings out of that gave me a strategy to prepare for the upcoming interviews and facing them confidently from then on. This is something that students need to prepare on right after CAT (and other major MBA exams) get over instead of waiting for the results. Sometimes, if it's the one and only call, it can't be taken as a practice round.