The countdown to CAT 2010 has begun. The next 8 

days are high-pressure days, but you need to remain balanced. Don’t make any decisions in haste and remain focused on your goal. “You should aim for beating the CAT, and not just belling it,” says a top MBA expert. 

This is time when you need the right guidance. To provide complete help to the MBA aspirants who are going to take CAT 2010, get help from our website Siliconindia.com.

The toppers offer you their advice on how to attempt the question paper, how to shape your strategy for final preparation, what to do a day before the exam and other important topics relevant to you.

Continuing with the special series, today we bring to you the interview with Rahul Mittal, student of IIM Kozhikode. He had scored 99.54 percentile in CAT 2009. He did his B.E. in Electronics and Communications from Delhi College of Engineering. He had 3 years of work experience in telecom domain when he took CAT 2009.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q. With just a month to go for CAT 2010, what is your advice to the test takers?

A. In the last days approaching to the D-day, I made sure that I give as many mock tests as possible. I never believed that understanding the fundamental concepts involved was any difficult rather how you apply them during the exam is what matters. Mock tests were a great means to experiment with the different strategies like which section to attempt first, how much time to spend in RCs, how to approach different formats of question paper etc. so that the CAT does not comes as a shocker to you.

Make sure that you spend enough time analyzing every mock test to understand your strong and weak areas and work on them. Good understanding of your strengths helps you select questions in the exam that you have a better probability of getting right.

Q. What should be the ideal study plan for a day?

A. I was working so I did not have the whole day at my disposal to prepare for CAT. But I made sure that with whatever little time I had, I touch upon most of the theoretical topics by giving sectional tests on the weekdays and analyzing them, which gave me a good understanding of my competency in that area and also helped me clear some of the doubts I had in that topic. The whole exercise becomes more rewarding if you can brush up the concepts on the topic before giving the exam.

For the weekends, as I said I used to give mock tests of different institutes and spend enough time analyzing them. The reason for giving tests from different institutes is that every institute prepares the mock test with varying level of difficulties in different sections and that helps you get prepared for any shock that CAT might have in store for you.

Q. How should the test takers prepare for each of the sections, Quantitative Ability, Verbal Ability and Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning?

A. Sectional tests would be the key to mastering individual topics in each of these sections. One should focus on areas where he/she is not very comfortable with.      

Q. How many mock tests should MBA aspirants ideally take at this stage?

A. If you are working, I would recommend taking at least 1-2 sectional tests on the weekdays and two full length mock tests on weekends.

People who not working can obviously put in a lot more effort and probably 1-2 sectional tests and a full length test every day should be the target when you have the whole day at your disposal.

Q. What was your strategy which you had followed a month before the exam?

A. As said earlier, the strategy was to give as many mock tests as possible and working on the topics I was weak at.

Q. How should the test takers plan to attempt the paper with respect to the three sections and time management?

A. This is a very subjective question and I think that depends on the competency that a person has in individual areas. The final aim of course is to target one section where you can maximize your score while making sure that you clear the cut offs for the other sections. The ideal way would be to screen the paper and then allocate time to different sections depending upon which section it is and where do you want to maximize your score.

The strategy I adopted was to screen the whole paper once to get a vague idea of the difficulty level of different sections and then attempt questions from each of the sections. For me the area that I usually targeted for score maximization was DI and quant was something where my first aim was to be to clear the cutoff by a comfortable margin. Verbal for me used to be the most unpredictable section and I spent like 25-30 minutes hoping that I clear the cutoff.
 
Q. What strategy should they follow 15, 7 and a day before the exam?

A. I am not sure whether I really remember what I did 15 or 7 days before the exam, but coming to think of it I feel the right strategy, for 15 days before the exam, would be to focus on individual topics and giving sectional tests on each of those to make sure that the concepts are in place.

7 days before the exam should be all about full length mock tests and a lot of analysis for each of those tests. I don’t think it’s a good idea to take up any topic in these days which you have not studied before and the focus should be on leveraging the strengths that you have developed over past few months.

Q. What should be the strategy of test takers while taking the exam?

A. Just keep your nerves and don’t panic at any point of time during the exam. Believe in your abilities and remember that if the exam is difficult for you, it is difficult for most of other test takers as well. It’s just about maintaining the same level of concentration throughout the exam and that’s why make sure that you have enough rest on the day before the exam.

Q. What is your take on the computer based format of CAT?

A. I think it’s a good initiative by IIMs to make sure that there’s consistency in the test environment for all the CAT takers. Even though there are times when people have encountered some technical glitches, but I am pretty hopeful that these things will go away with the extended test duration and the hard work being put in by Prometric.

Q. Any other information/suggestion you would like to share with the CAT 2010 takers?
 
A. I wish all the CAT 2010 aspirants all the best for the exam and just want to let all of you know that this is just one of the means to achieve your ambitions in life and it’s definitely not the end of the road just in case you don’t perform well in the exam.