With barely two weeks left for the Common Admission Test to begin, a few students from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE) tell us what they did in their last 20 days before the exam last year. Illustration by Dominic Xavier
The Common Admission Test is a pre-requisite for admission to the 13 Indian Institutes of Management and other leading business schools in the country.
The test will be held between October 16 and November 11, 2013.
This year approximately 1.94 lakh students will be competing for 3000 odd seats in these management colleges.
With comparatively fewer applicants as against last year, there should be less competition this year.
Here are a few strategies to crack the CAT shared by students of NITIE, Mumbai.
Darpan Thacker who scored 99.78 in CAT 2012 had to manage his work and preparation at the same time.
He used to solve at least 3 RCs and 30 VA problems on a daily basis, as verbal was his weak area.
He followed this schedule strictly on weekdays after returning from his office.
On weekends he used to spend around eight to nine hours on mocks and analyses.
Darpan says that by the last leg of preparation, aspirants should be aware of their strengths and weaknesses.
For the last two weeks he suggests appearing for mocks regularly and focusing on reducing the wrong attempts.
As per Abhijit Pednekar who managed to score 99.44 in the CAT while working, the last few days can make or break the whole preparation.
He says that in the last two to three weeks, one should focus on sharpening the strong areas.
He is of the view that aspirants get demotivated with a bad start in mock or actual CAT and thus tend to subconsciously give up on the rest of the paper.
He believes that in the last few days, they should try to maintain their confidence level and never get demoralized by few initial setbacks.
Darshit Shah, a fresher, who appeared for CAT 2012, scored 99.78 percentile in his first attempt.
He recommends maintaining formulae and bullet points for revisions.
Darshit also maintained a separate notebook for tricky questions with their solutions, so that he could glance through them as and when required.
Being a fresher, he suggests taking mocks in the same time slot as the actual CAT’s, as this helps to tune your mind and reduce anxieties.
Bharat Sharma who cracked CAT with a whopping 99.77 percentile recommends focusing on mocks in the last 20 days.
He says that the best approach is to maintain an excel sheet to track your performance.
After taking a mock one should try to fill self-analysis for each of the 60 question in the sheet.
He used to take a mock every 3rd or the 4th day but only after thoroughly analysing the previous mock.
He recommends that aspirants should also start to revise the concepts as the D day approaches and not leave everything for the last day.
Team Impact of NITIE, wishes you all the very best for CAT 2013 and hopes that the above experiences help you secure good scores.
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