How To Prepare For CAT And XAT While Working - Aroon's Journey To XLRI Jamshedpur

I was progressing quite quickly in the organisation and the workload also kept increasing with each day. To make it worse, the universe conspired to make me work in shifts. I was working in a different shift every other week. Things started getting complicated and I could not find much time to study. However, I realised that whatever theoretical knowledge I had to acquire, I had acquired it while preparing for the previous two attempts. This time I focused only on mocks. I took a mock, reviewed it thoroughly and then took another one. My average percentile score during the mocks was around 82 percentile. I did nothing else for preparation. Finally, the day arrived and I took the CAT in 2016. I scored a 98.92 overall with a 99.78 percentile in DI/LR. I took the XAT in 2017 and scored a 98.5 percentile overall with a 99.226 in decision-making. Surprised?

With many failures, you gain experience! After failing twice in the tests and having analysed the results of the previous few years, I always knew my score of 82 percentile in the mocks was good enough. The key piece of information that I always kept at the back of my mind was that by the time D-day arrives, a majority of the test takers give up! I leveraged this fact and did not give up. Whatever you may be scoring in your mocks, there is a high probability that you will end up scoring higher in the actual test. It is only about maximising it as much as you can and a lot of it depends on your attitude on D-day. CAT/XAT are more about your test-taking strategies rather than formulas and methods. If this is your last attempt at CAT/XAT or any other management entrance exam, just remember that you probably know everything that you could ever know in terms of the syllabus, you just need to hang in there and develop your best strategy to take the test.

All the best for your preparations!