With CAT 2015 just about two and a half months away, I am
sure you would be looking for useful advice for your preparation. As a regular
exam-taker, I will present some important insights and tips based on last year’s
exam. These points will help you fine-tune your preparation and help you
prepare better for the exam.
Lesson 1: Reading Comprehensions continued to be diverse and had no
fact based questions
Reading comprehension passages in CAT 2014 were relatively easier
than passages in previous years but they were still quite challenging.
Featuring articles from a diverse range of topics, these passages featured inference
and logic-based questions only. Sadly, fact-based questions were absent from
the exam. Some of the question types in the exam were:
·
If given a chance, what will you ask the author
of the passage?
·
Identify the tone/attitude of the author.
·
What would the author agree or disagree with?
·
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
Looking at the question types above, it is very important
that you pay close attention to your Reading Comprehension preparation and make
sure that you solve some challenging reading comprehension exercises.
Unfortunately, there are not a lot of sources for quality RC passages and you
would have to depend on previous years’ questions and mock CAT RCs.
Lesson 2: Level of Grammar based questions was surprisingly low
As a major surprise, the level of Grammar questions was much
lower than what has been the case in previous years’ exams. This does not
necessarily mean that the same will continue this year but in case it does,
these are essentially bonus marks. All you need to do is make sure that you
have covered the basics of Grammar at least. You can use Prepathon to cover the
important topics in Grammar.
Lesson 3: Be prepared for questions types such as Misfit Sentence (odd
one out) and Paragraph Summary questions
All of a sudden, CAT has suddenly developed a liking for
these question types in the last two years. It makes a lot of sense to work on
these questions types and solve some extra questions for these.
Lesson 4: Time management and Question selection are the keys to
success
Time management and Question selection are two aspects which
are a part of every CAT exam. With a strict sectional time limit of 60 minutes
for this year’s exam, these aspects become extremely important. Make sure that you
do not get stuck on the non-RC questions and focus on going through all the
questions in the section at least once. Also, be careful with your RC
selection. You are not under any compulsion to solve all passages or all
questions of a single passage. Read the first paragraph of a passage and if it causes
you a lot of discomfort, shift to the next one. Those Verbal Ability questions
that seemed tough or obscure to you in the first place should only be attempted
if you think that you do not have any other choice or if you are left with some
extra time.
These are some of the important things that you should keep
in mind for the Verbal Ability portion of CAT 2015.
Happy Learning!