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Are you a graduate or in the final year of graduation and aspiring to pursue management studies at post graduation level? If yes, then you need to appear for Common Admission Test (CAT) 2018.

Your preparation needs to be in full swing so that you can do well and get an admission in a management institute of your choice. However, as a matter of fact, every year lac of students try their hand at CAT, but fail to reach the final destination. So, in order to ace the CAT and have a proper preparation, you should be armed with a potent strategy.

CAT, being the most competitive exam for management school admissions is a gate-pass for students wanting to secure admissions in good colleges. There are numerous good B-schools in the country other than those whose names start with double I’s that use CAT scores for their PGDM admissions.

CAT exam does not mull over your intellect in terms of Verbal Ability, Quantitative Aptitude, Data Interpretation and Logical abilities only, but it weighs upon how one approaches the questions and how he cracks them in the lesser time. Thus, you need not necessarily attempt all the questions, rather make a smart choice about the ones you are going to attempt. Your focus should be to maximize the number of correct answers with the least possible number of incorrect ones.

Keeping this in mind, there is no need to study round the clock and attempt everything. However, chalk out a strategy so that most of the answers are correct and time taken to answer the questions is as least as possible.

Now, food for thought is how to avoid mistakes in CAT preparation and subsequently in the exams. The most prominent measures to avoid mistakes are listed down as below:

1. Imbalanced Performance across three sections

You may be good at your own domain, be it Quantitative Aptitude, Verbal Ability or Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning, however each section is of equal weightage and contributes significantly to your final selection. You also need to score a bare minimum in each of those three sections to improve your chances of selection. At the same time, there is time limit for each section individually. So, if the time is not managed properly, you might miss on some questions in a particular section and that may adversely affect the chances of your selection.

2. Sacrificing accuracy for speed

Some of the opinions suggest to increase the speed of answering questions. Without doubt, that is certainly a good idea, but you need to keep in mind that while doing so, you should not sacrifice accuracy. If the accuracy levels do fall, so shall the probability of yours getting a good score.

3. Spending too much time on one question

Scheming total time to all questions in the paper is important. For each question you get roughly 2.5 minutes. It might happen that you’re stuck with calculations on a particular question and still have strong belief of solving it. So it might be better to dispose your thought and leave that particular  question if it is expected to take more than 150 seconds. However you need to develop the skills to judge the expected time to solve the question beforehand while going through the question otherwise you may end up wasting time.

4. Attempting Question Haphazardly

One of the most important steps to be taken towards good preparation is to identify subjects and topics of your interest and weaknesses. Start with your comfortable zone and create provision for the weak zone at a later stage.

5. Practicing with difficult problems

It is a general presumption that if someone is able to solve the problems of higher difficulty levels, then he will be doing well in case of easier ones. This presumption does not turn to be true in many a cases. You need to understand that CAT is not meant for doing the bull-fight. Rather to begin with, you need to practice simple questions or short puzzles and in due course of time, emphasize improving on speed and accuracy levels.

6. Mugging up the formulae

For Quantitative Aptitude, you may not mug up hundreds of formulae. So in case you are getting stuck up with a particular question, conduct an eagles eye analysis and see whether ‘elimination technique’ can work. To use this technique, look at the all options as listed down and then analyze which all option(s) cannot be the answer. Many times, you will be left with only one or two options and that’s the fastest way of unfolding a riddle in case you may not know the exact answer.

7. Bottom-Up approach in Reading comprehension

Often observed, many of us read the question and start dodging the answer into the long paragraphs. However the correct approach is to follow waterfall approach where you start reading the paragraphs thoroughly and then answer the questions altogether. This saves lot of time in reading comprehension.

Lastly, don’t panic just before or during the CAT examination. Take adequate sleep a night before to keep yourself calm and prompt in thinking. This can be an ultimate success mantra for your CAT 2018 journey.

So if you are looking for admissions in any of the top management institutes of the country like Asian Business School, Noida, then certainly you need to do well in CAT 2018.