How I Scored 99.98 Percentile In CAT 2019 - Jaideep Tanwar, IIM-C Convert

These scores, coupled with the immensely helpful community that I had found on that online forum, made me confident of getting a good score in the CAT exam. But it is not meant to go your way every time. I choked on the exam day and could manage a borderline 99 percentile score only. This was not enough to get a call from the top B-schools. Then I got placed at an American multinational, and I had to relocate to Bangalore. This time it got way more hectic for me to manage a job with my preparation and so I decided to change my approach towards this exam. I realised that I had some shortcomings, and it would take a good amount of hard work to overcome them. Moreover, since I loved solving puzzles, I started to view this exam as nothing but a set of puzzles so that I find it interesting enough to study for after spending 8+ hours in the office.

This season demanded lesser preparation from the base level as most of that was already done in the previous year. This time I had to go into the details and become prepared for any possible kind of exam on the D-day. Moreover, I ensured that I do not repeat the mistakes that I had made in CAT 2018 by panicking by being cool throughout the exam. Fortunately, I was able to maintain a good momentum in each of the sections and got a set of very balanced percentiles.

VARC: 99.73, DILR: 99.86, QA: 99.85, Overall: 99.98 percentile.

Some tips that I think may help the other aspirants:

• Surround yourself with a set of people who are also preparing seriously for this exam. If you do not have such a group of people around you, then join the various forums available online. It will help you stay motivated and enjoy the journey.
• When looking for resources to prepare for CAT, prioritise the use of past and current years' mock papers over any textbook or any offline coaching. All that you need is in these mock papers. You just have to put in the effort from your side.
• For the non-engineers, you may hear it from a lot of sources that CAT is designed for the engineers. Trust me, that's not true at all. I have seen a lot of engineer friends struggle in VARC, DILR and QA and then get high scores with sheer hard work. CAT does not require high-level maths to score well in DILR and QA. Whatever level of maths that it needs can be learned from scratch by anyone.
• The most crucial thing in the entire preparation phase is to analyse your mocks thoroughly. If a mock takes 3 hours to attempt, then it will take ~4-5 hours on an average to analyse it. Keep a note of your mistakes and the new formulae/tricks that you learn and keep moulding your mock-taking strategy according to that.

Section-wise tips:

Verbal: To get better at this section, you need to do two things – get comfortable at reading long and harder to read texts and formulate a discipline to solve the questions. To get better at reading, do not start reading novels. Rather, try to read online articles from a based on a variety of topics every day. This will make you comfortable with reading a wide range of topics.

Reasoning: I realised this the hard way in my first attempt, but to get better at this section, you need to develop an affinity for solving brainteasers. There is no way around it. Start solving 5-8 sets from random mock papers everyday and analyse them thoroughly. If done correctly, this alone will get you a good score in this section.

Quant: This section is the fairest and the easiest to master (if one is willing to put in the work obviously) in the sense that the role of luck and the amount of randomness involved here is way lesser than the other two sections. Start solving 30-50 random questions from past years' mock papers everyday and keep a note of anything new and novel that you come across. Revise these notes regularly, and you should be good for the D-day.

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