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A common question in the mind of every CAT aspirant is how to approach the paper. I had always felt the same before getting into XLRI. Those 3 hours of exam are the most crucial 3 hours of your life and so you need to know and plan for it to ace the exam and come out with flying colors.

I would explain the approaches to the three sections one by one, starting off with my favorite one DI, then Quant and followed by English.

Data Interpretation Section

The DI portion, if you look at it, is not so tough especially for the ones with engineering background. All you need to do is to analyze the data and find out the ways in which the data given is interrelated. These days CAT has been following a 25 question pattern, (which might change) with around 5 sets of 5 questions. Remember this is a very scoring section. As the questions are in pair, once you understand one set logically, you can definitely solve atleast 4 out of the 5 problems in a set. You can first go through all the sets and try to identify which are the ones you can manage to do quickly. Its important to go through all the questions just to make sure that you are not wasting time on a tougher set whereas there might be some easier set which you might not be able to do justice with, if you wont look at it in the beginning itself. So go through the sets and identify what to solve first and then once you are done with it move on to the next set. Don’t stick too much to any set, because you might end up wasting time over that question which could have fetched you marks in some other set/section.

Quant Section

As far as Quant is concerned, here again engineers definitely have an upper hand. But the questions asked in CAT are just the implementation of concepts. So what you need to do as a part of your preparation is to clear the concepts and try to identify the area of quant you are strong at. Once you identify that, it would be easy for you in the examination hall to go through the questions once and identify which ones are easier for you. Some questions easier for you might not be easier for others and vice versa. So you need to find your strong areas and work on the weaker ones. Like in DI, here again you need to identify out of the 25 questions you can do within a reasonable time and devote your time to those questions. Again don’t stick to any question for more than 2-3 minutes if you are not going anywhere in the question.

English Section

English/VA section of the CAT exam these days have become a very tricky one. If you ask most of the toppers the method they use to crack verbal is to attempt as many questions as they can. The reason is simple. You can practice a lot in verbal but still the level of questions asked and the options given are so close that you can never be sure of what to expect from each answer. So the best way out is to attempt as much as you can and guess reasonably. The pattern of VA over the few years have been same with questions varying from 25-35. The focus is on grammer and comprehension, so you need to work through that. Reading general magazines, novels and newspapers help a lot as you get accustomed to reading that kind of stuff and that to in a reasonable time.

Thus clarity of concepts and having a proper plan in place for those 3 hours is the secret for success. You all can do it. Just Go for it!!