Jaskaran Singh Sachdeva
Below are the account sof three toppers, Ravi Teja Palla, who we have mentioned about before, Jaskaran Singh Sachdeva from Bangalore and Sumit Patil from Pune.
For Jaskaran, this was the final time he was sitting for a management entrance test. Having taken the exam three times before, Jaskaran made sure that he left no stone unturned with a scintillating 100 percentile in Common Admission Test (CAT) 2012. Currently working with Infosys in Bangalore, the electrical engineer from National Institute of Technology, Bhopal is very excited about his performance. “I freaked out when I saw my score. I made sure first that that my sectional scores were alright. Then I called up a friend to inform him. Haven’t slept a wink last night!,” he told PaGaLGuY.com
Jaskarans score card
This topper is originally from Pune and currently pursuing his BTech+MTech integrated course in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras. This is his first attempt. He started off with focusing on quant skills. Once he was thorough with that, he focused on speed. Then switched to Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning.
Sumit’s word of advice to CAT takers is that you just need to focus on practice and putting in a conscious effort. “It is very important to learn from your mistakes. Dont give up if you are not getting something or you perform badly in practice tests a couple of times.”
He cited his own example of reading comprehensions which did not come easily to him. He solved a few mocks and previous year papers, sat down and analysed his mistakes and then was good at it.
Sumit has not given any other exam. He wants to target the top 6 IIMs and is hoping to get into the top.
According to the young achiever, an attempt to answer all sixty questions in the test is never a good strategy. Ravi realised this in his CAT 2011 attempt, where he answered all sixty questions but got a percentile of 98.34. This time he did not attempt four of the sixty questions in the paper and his results showed.
Although Ravi had joined preparation classes at Career Launcher for CAT 2011, he depended totally on the mock preparation tests and online support provided by the coaching institute for CAT 2012. Working as an assistant manager with Tata Motors in Pune did not leave him too much of preparation time.. However, Ravi made sure that he solved at least one mock test every day.
“My day’s preparation was not complete with just solving one mock paper,” Ravi said. After solving the paper, he dedicated upto three hours to compare his thought process while solving individual questions to the formulae provided in the solution of the respective test paper by the coaching institute.
Although Quant is his strong point, Ravi discovered that specific sections like probability and set theory were taking him more time than the other topics. Similarly, in the Verbal section he found out that he always got the tone of the passage wrong. In addition, he found difficulty in solving the questions related to grammatical error correction in the section.
CAT 2012 had three grammatical error questions. “In these type of questions, instead of depending upon the options, I formulate the answers in my head first. Then I compare my thought process to the options.” However, Ravi specified that he would mark an answer for these questions only if his thought process matched perfectly with either one of the options otherwise he would leave the question unmarked.
“Following my strategy, I was able to answer two of the three grammatical error questions but left the third unmarked,” he told PaGaLGuY. The ultimate objective is to answer those questions that you are absolutely sure about. This will help you make the leap to the perfect score, he said.
Originally from Vishakhapatnam, Ravi is an electrical engineer from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. His father is a government servant and his mother is a housewife. He has a younger brother who is currently pursuing engineering from IIT Kharagpur.
A perfect score will ensure calls from almost all the top b-schools in the country for this youngster. However, his aim is to get admission into Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta. In addition to the presence of friends at the institute, Ravi feels that the study strategy at the b-school would suit his thought process the most.