CAT Preparation & Strategy

Common Admission Test is the premier management entrance test to secure admission to top Indian B-Schools. How should a candidate go about preparing for CAT?

At the outset, I’ll make one thing clear – preparation is candidate-specific! There are probably people out there who might have scored more than 99.90 percentile without preparation. Others might have had to prepare hard to reach 95.

Now, How can you personalise your preparation?

Start by gauging where you stand vis~a~vis CAT. You have to determine sections and areas where you are strong, understand areas and aspects you need to improve – Mocks help you here.

Try getting a lay of the land before financially committing to anything. Coaching institutions provide solved and unsolved past papers. 2IIM, for instance, has a treasure trove of free questions while Career Launcher (and others as well) provide access to some 1-3 mocks for free (or at least used to). Once you go through a couple of them, you’d be in a better position to decide how to go ahead.

Also, don’t be disheartened if your score happens to be bad. People have started from even worse scores to success. That’s the whole point of preparing – you will see a lot of examples on LinkedIn and elsewhere. 

The next step is to decide if you need coaching. You’d probably have a lot of questions. Coaching or Self-Preparation? Should you play to your strengths or work on your weaknesses? Which mock series? Which coaching institution? and so on…

Well, I won’t give a specific answer to the the last question. Different people get different results with different coaching providers depending on how well-suited the teaching is for them. Different faculty would have different strengths and styles. Similarly, some mock series would be good for a particular section or skill – you might have read people saying series X good for verbal or quant etc. 

I’ll try answering the other questions one by one. 

Evaluate how well you are doing now for CAT in general.

How is your performance across sections? Do you think you can fill current gaps by yourself with practice? Do you think there are topics where you need to improve your conceptual clarity?

Think about the answers to these questions. 

I wrote my first CAT in my final year of engineering. I read a lot of answers on Quora by toppers who essentially said that practising mocks without attending coaching is the way to go. The posts kind of said that the syllabus is basic and a candidate just needs practice to improve. 

I was naive and believed that without thinking about my context. I would have benefitted from some coaching – they would have strengthened concepts for me. It would have also given some structure and discipline to my preparation, which was haphazard or absent otherwise. 

I ended up preparing in an unstructured way. Moreover, I did not recognise my weak point (DILR) nor did I create a realistic strategy to write the exam.

My exam was a disaster! I scored low in DILR and Quant. I got an acceptable percentile by scoring high (99.48) in VARC, my strong area. So, when I decided to write CAT seriously in 2021, I opted for coaching. I was able to significantly improve my score in the DILR section leading to a good overall percentile. 

The key thing was identifying my weak area i.e. DILR and working on it. I spent nearly half my time preparing for DILR and half on Quants. I kept aside just some time to read long-form articles for VARC. This might not work if you are scoring lower in the verbal ability section. That is why I said – Personalise it!

You should similarly think about where you stand and make an educated decision on attending coaching .

Another thing I would like to add is that attending coaching would expose you to alternative and more intuitive ways of solving questions, which would help in improving your speed and conceptual clarity. 

Now, Should you stick to your strengths or work on your weaknesses? It, again, depends. 

The marginal improvement you can get out of your strong area is lower if you are already doing well there. You need to be somewhat good in all sections to do well overall. This is because it is harder to get a good score with low sectional scores. Plus, most B-Schools have minimum sectional cut-offs. 

I’d recommend working on your weaknesses so that your performance improves to an average to above-average level of proficiency. It’s alright if it is slightly below average if you can’t help it. In those cases, improving your score in your stronger sections is also important. 

However, don’t be disappointed if you are scoring low in a section despite a lot of work. If nothing works, there are B-Schools that don’t have sectional cutoffs. They are few in number though, so I wouldn’t recommend this if you can improve your performance. Otherwise, you’d be eliminating your prospects at a large number of B-Schools. 

Simply put, the idea is to maximise your overall score by maximising your sectionals. You can do this in a variety of ways – high in one section and baseline in others to equally good across sections.

If you don’t know already, the 80, 85, 90, and even 95 percentile scores (overall and sectionals) are very low in comparison to the 99 or 99.5 values. There is also a huge difference between 99.9 and 100 percentilers! 

You should work hard enough so that you can clear the sectional cutoffs, which are between 70-85 percentile for each section in most B-Schools. Aiming to be 90%+ across sections is both doable and safe.

The rest of your efforts should be spent on maximising your overall score using a strategy you think would work best – whether it is focusing on one or two sections, or working hard across the board. Use mocks to test your strategies and polish them. 

I’d like to end with a note of caution. Don’t spend too much time strategising. CAT might throw a googly and your strategy might go out the window – say, your strong section is harder in a particular year. That is why it’s recommended to achieve a baseline level of proficiency in all sections so that your overall score is still within your target range. Don’t rely too much on one section.  

If you check my profile, you’ll see that I scored lower in CAT 2020 than in CAT 2019. This was because I was banking on the VARC section in 2020. I tried solving all questions in VARC even when I found it hard that year, resulting in a much lower sectional score.

I am not trying to say that banking on one section is bad or attempting all questions in VARC is bad (I did that in CAT 2021 in which I got 21 right out of 24). Everything has its pros and cons. Spreading your risks and returns is always a more intelligent choice, just like how portfolio diversification is in finance! In fact, I’d go further and even say it’s good strategy to take the XAT and even other management tests seriously.