There are around 8 months left for the CAT 2011, if the IIMs stick to the same schedule they followed in 2010. The exam paper consists of three sections, which includes quantitative reasoning, data interpretation, and verbal reasoning. It is very important to do equally well in all sections if you want to get calls from the top institutes. They have individual cut-offs for each section. I will briefly outline how one should go about preparing for each section.Quantitative Ability:
This is the section where engineering students tend to do quite well. What matters the most in this section is solving a particular problem in the least amount of time. With a good background in mathematics and maybe a lot of practice to build up, it is always possible to solve problems fast, just through basic principles. Yet, it helps to know some tricks. A common pitfall is in trying to learn the tricks without understanding them, and I would recommend deriving them on your own from basic principles, in order to gain a thorough understanding.
Preparation for this section should begin by refreshing basic concepts and solving various problems on these topics. Understand the formulae well. In the initial phase, make sure you are able to solve all questions, no matter how much time it takes. While checking your answers, go through the model solution for all the questions, even the ones where you got your answer right, as there is always the chance of coming across a better method.
Once you are done with all the concepts, the next phase is to improve your speed. This comes with a lot of practice and having a habit to analyse solutions. In areas like Combinatorics and Work-Time, your speed increases considerably with practice. It is also important to note that if you are not able to solve a problem or if you make conceptual mistakes in this phase, go over a concept again in detail. With this approach, you will improve your speed and accuracy leading to a high percentile in this section.
Data Interpretation:
Preparing for this section is about solving as many problems of all the different types as you can -- in order to improve speed and accuracy. It is important to keep in mind the following points:
The first thing to do is master the art of transferring data on the screen to the rough sheet. Do this smartly while reading the question set, which saves a lot of time. Identify the question sets that you can solve in the least amount of time per question, and solve them first. To do that, looking at all the question sets quickly before solving any of them is important.
Often, large parts of the data provided are not useful in answering the questions. So develop the ability to identify the useful data by going through the question. For the problems based on numerical data involving tedious calculations, learn to quickly get approximate answers by rounding off to two decimals and match them with the correct option.
There is one last thing I would like to mention. I already discussed it for quant, but it works better for this section. Always go through the model answers for a question set no matter whether you get it right or wrong for the same reasons as in quant. Comparing methods and using the best possible method for processing data and
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