(Original photo credit: Rafael Kage)
An often asked question is, “What is the difference between the average CAT student in Verbal Ability and a 99 percentiler in Verbal Ability?”
(You will notice that I do not yet say ‘an IIM convert’ because for every six ’99 percentilers’ who are interviewed, only one makes it. But that is a different story to be discussed on another day.)
So one day in the class where I teach, I decided to illustrate the difference.
Q1: How many of you have heard of Facebook ?
Class: 101% (Which is roughly what SRCC’s cutoff will be next year! So don’t say that’s impossible!).
Q2: How many of you are on Facebook?
Class: 85%.
Q3: How many use it once in a while?
Class: 65%.
Q4: How many have heard of the movie ‘The Social Network’ based on the story behind Facebook?
Class: 55%.
Q5: How many have seen the movie ‘The Social Network’?
Class: 35%.
Q6: How many have heard of the book ‘The Accidental Billionaires’, the book from which ‘The Social Network’ is inspired?
Class: 10%.
Q7: How many of you have read the book ‘The Accidental Billionaires’?
Class: 1%.
Elementary, My Dear Watson!
Moral of the Story: If you are doing pretty much what everybody else is doing to prepare for the CAT, then you are not doing much. You have to do something different!
Which brings me to today’s topic ‘How to Build your CAT Network’.
There was a time when a serious student who wanted to acquire additional knowledge and do more research had to visit a library and pore over heavy tomes in the quest for that fountain of wisdom. Lots of drudgery was involved, not to mention facing the occasional occupational hazard of hallucinating (reference: Lage Raho Munnabhai). But today, that knowledge is easily accessible to you at your finger tips through your mobile phones.
What do you need to build your ‘CAT network’?
1. A mobile phone that allows you to access the Internet. With the mobile phone, you can be online 24×7 at any location, allowing you to use ‘dead time zones’ for productive purposes. An example of a ‘DTZ’ is the commute time spent by you to and fro from office.
2. An Internet connection for your computer. The fact that you’re reading this article must mean that you already have access to one.
Plan of action
1. Create an email account specifically for CAT preparation purpose. Use this account solely for CAT-related emails. As a generic rule: whenever you come across a website that you find useful, just sign up for updates.
2. Open a Facebook account for CAT purpose. Don’t use your current personal account (too many distractions when you log in). Sign up for all Facebook pages and communities offering CAT-related knowledge.
3. Open a Twitter account if you don’t have one. Follow any Twitter users who regularly post MBA-related updates.
How can ‘The CAT Network’ help you with improving your English?
English is not a subject that you can gulp down in one go. Language skills cannot be built overnight, nor can the nuances of a language be downloaded into your mind inside packed classroom sessions. Here is a better way to progressively get better at English,
1. Vocabulary
a) Join http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
(i) Check out their Homepage everyday. It is bound to add new words to your vocabulary.
(ii) Enroll for the Word of the Day newsletter. This will push words into your email Inbox everyday and force you to learn one new word and its usage everyday.
(iii) Whenever you come across a new word, punch it into the site. Look at all the meanings of the word. Their collection of phrasal verbs is among the best. The CAT expects you to know multiple meanings of words. For example, if I punch in ‘home’, this is what I get: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/home. You now know the different ways the word ‘home’ could be used and you thought you knew the meaning of the word perfectly well.
(iv) Follow the website’s accounts on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.
b) http://dictionary.reference.com/: This gives you both a dictionary and a thesaurus to build your vocabulary with.
(i) Enroll for their ‘word of the day’.
(ii) Test yourself using some of the fun tests which are also useful at the same time. For example the day I wrote this article, the homepage had a test on the types of ‘Phobias’ — something that appears regularly in the FMS test.
(iii) Use the thesaurus feature to learn new words. Say, you come across the word ‘bedlam’. When you check out the thesaurus it shows that the word ‘bedlam’ is close in meaning to: ‘chaos’, ‘clamor’, ‘commotion’, ‘confusion’, ‘din’, ‘disquiet’, ‘disquietude’, ‘furor’, ‘hubbub’, ‘madhouse’, ‘maelstrom’, ‘noise’, ‘pandemonium’, ‘racket’, ‘shambles’, ‘tumult’, ‘turmoil’ and ‘uproar ‘. Our brains are so structured that we visualize words in groups. Now if you come across the word ‘racket’ somewhere, you will immediately relate it to ‘bedlam’!
(c) http://www.alphadictionary.com/goodword/today: A good dictionary for origins of words. Enroll for the ‘What’s the Good Word‘ emailer. For example, this is what it has to say about the word ‘Yankee’: “A British officer in 1789 suggested that Yankee comes from the Cherokee word eankhe, which means ‘slave’, ‘coward’. It might just as well come from a Native American pronunciation of English, ‘yengees’, which later became Yankees. Yankee could have been withdrawn from this word by back derivation. Most probably, however, it comes from Dutch nickname for Jan (John): Janke, where the Dutch ‘J’ is pronounced .”
d) Visit http://vocabmagik.com/. A good way to learn new words. I once spotted cartoon of a drunk Mr Bacchhan used to explain the word ‘bacchanalian’ (a drunken person) on this site.
2. Reading and Comprehension
a) Go to www.wikipedia.org. Go to the ‘featured content’ section and further to featured articles. You will find articles segregated by topic. Pick any random topic which you have absolutely no clue about, a different one each day (Architecture, Art, Chemistry, Economics), especially subjects you have never heard of and read the articles under that topic. This will increase the range of your vocabulary and get you up to speed for rapidly scanning unfamiliar topics.
b) CAT reading passages have in the past been picked up from The Guardian newspaper. Browse it daily. That is the kind of vocabulary level expected of you. Sign up for their free newsletters so that you keep getting emails and links from them. I also recommend The New York Times and The Times of India. For more sources, check out my thread.
c) Visit Google Scholar. Type in any keyword, say ‘mortgage’. It will throw up research papers and articles on the topic. One example — http://www.jstor.org/pss/2118254. You will need aspirin to go through the articles but your comprehension power will skyrocket if you persevere!
3. Grammar
a) An excellent site for Phrasal Verbs is: http://www.phrasalverbdemon.com/.
b) Grammar Girl: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/
c) http://www.edufind.com/english/grammar/
d) http://www.englishgrammar.org/
e) Check out the page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_grammar
Interact with other CAT aspirants
Well you are already here! There is no better site in India for clearing your verbal ability doubts than https://www.pagalguy.com/cat.
Testing
There are plenty of websites which allow you to test yourself in short bursts under a timer. At least the two that I know of with a good quality of tests which can be taken on the go are www.complore.com and www.tenaday.co.in.
General knowledge
1. News
Enroll for for global and national newspapers (at least two each) and sign-up for their daily updates. This will keep you informed and upto date about current events.
2. Views
Subscribe to or browse through editorial content of newspapers for analysis and opinion of news — http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/
3. Business GK
Please follow http://www.businessworld.in/businessworld/businessworld/ and http://businesstoday.intoday.in/ and the business pages of your daily newspaper.
The ‘Lonely Planet’ of helpful websites to surf
Visit these websites on a regular basis, preferably in a scheduled manner. Set reminders on your mobile phone. Allot each website a day and remember to scan it on that day.
Suggested Schedule,
Everyday: https://www.pagalguy.com/. Especially the weekend reading digests :). I find so many students completely unaware of changes in the MBA and business education world. And if you do not know anything about the MBA world which you are supposedly so passionate about — what will you know about the world outside?
Monday: http://totalgadha.com/ (Excellent for CAT preparation oriented articles).
Tuesday: http://www.mbauniverse.com/ (News and press releases related to MBA).
Wednesday: http://testfunda.com/ (Test Prep).
Thursday: http://www.rediff.com/getahead/cat.html (News, test-prep chats, etc).
Friday: http://www.coolavenues.com/ (MBA and career-related articles).
Subscribe! Subscribe! Subscribe!
Follow! Follow! Follow!
Once you have put the above suggested regimen into place, your CAT preparation for VA will be on autopilot. All you have to do is to open your CAT-specific email inbox, the Facebook and Twitter accounts every morning and go through all the updates religiously. Do not forget to send a thank you note to Mark Zuckerberg!
Tanveer Ahmed is an alumnus of St Xaviers College, Kolkata and currently works with a people search firm as a recruiter. He is a visiting faculty with T.I.M.E. and also coaches and mentors CAT hopefuls online in the intricacies of the English language. (On LinkedIn)
If you think you have what it takes to write interesting articles of the above kind on CAT strategy and have a past record of 99 percentiles in mocks, we are looking for Freelance test prep writers. Feel free to apply and well be happy to hear from you!