Don't rush to remember all the difficult formulas that rarely come up in the exam, advises six-time CAT topper and MBA expert rediffGURU Patrick D'Souza.
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A lot of students, as soon as they finish the syllabus, start with revision.
In most cases, students begin by revising the notes they have created and rereading the theory.
Re-reading feels productive. It seems like you can remember things.
But here's the reality: CAT is not a memory-based exam. It is an exam that checks how you think under stress.
Most of the questions in the exam are not formula-based; they are based on simple concepts you studied at the school level, not some exotic mantra you need to remember.
The question is just twisted to make you think.
In fact, remembering too many things could actually cause you to underperform in CAT as you will waste time trying to apply a formula instead of understanding the problem and solving it.
I am not saying that you should not remember formulas or make a formula book. You can make one only for a few important concepts, methods or formulas.
Don't rush to remember all the difficult formulas that never come up in the exam.
If you go through the PYQs, you will realise that almost all the questions are based on simple concepts. If you just remember these simple concepts, it should be sufficient to crack the exam.
To give you an example of what I am trying to say, I remember once, when I was coming out of the CAT exam hall, some coaching classes were distributing sheets of formulas for permutation and combination. It was a six-page booklet.
I went through it and realised that I did not know any of the formulas mentioned in the booklet.
For a moment, I thought that I was actually weak in maths and not worthy of teaching that subject.
But, on further thought, I realised that I could solve almost all the CAT sums during the exam and had also scored a 100 percentile in the Quant section multiple times.
So the problem was not with me but with the formula sheet. These formulas are not required for the exam and knowing them would only make me slower.
Let me list down two wrong methods of preparing:
Mistake 1: The first case is that of a student who keeps rereading the notes and formulas that he has made but does not practise enough new sums to learn how to solve problems that are different and require the application of simple concepts.
Because of this, though he may have a lot of knowledge, he is not able to perform well in the exam environment.
Mistake 2: Here, the student keeps practising new sums and writing mocks without going back to understand the concepts he was not able to solve.
In that case, the concepts the student is weak in remain weak, the same mistakes get repeated and the student ends up underperforming in the exam.
The right way to revise is to solve a new set of questions on a topic rather than going through the questions you have already solved.
If you don't understand an important concept while solving sums, go back and try to understand that concept once and see how it can be applied to similar sums. This will help you reinforce the concepts that are repeatedly tested in the exam.
I am not suggesting that you should never re-attempt the sums that you have already solved. If they are important questions that you have marked to help you understand key concepts or PYQs (previous year's questions), you can go through them again.
I had a student who was preparing for more than 12 hours a day.
She had made a lot of notes and kept going through them again and again.
I recommended that she not spend so much time on her CAT preparation as it would only saturate her and not help the thinking process that is important for cracking CAT. But she continued and ended up with just 50 percentile.
The next year, she started working and prepared for CAT alongside her job.
She changed her approach to solving problems. She ended up with a 90+percentile score and got into one of the top 20 colleges.
Understand that CAT is a different type of exam. It largely tests your ability to think.
Most of the concepts are things you have already studied in school.
Other competitive exams, like CA or college entrance exams, are mainly knowledge-based exams that test you on the knowledge you have acquired during the course.
Your revision for CAT should not focus on rote learning; it is about developing your thinking ability.
- CAT or MBA-admission related questions? Ask rediffGURU Patrick D'souza HERE.
Patrick D'Souza has 25 years of experience training students for MBA entrance exams. He is a six-time CAT 100 percentiler, two-time XAT topper, three-time CET topper and two-time NMAT topper.
