CAT Exam 2018 – CAT Questions to attempt and leave

If you are aspiring to pursue a post graduation program in management studies starting from academic year 2019, it is expected that your preparations for CAT 2018 must be in full swing. By now you must be having a fair idea of how to approach the admission test. To do well on the D-Day, it would be advisable that you take up practice sessions pretty seriously, very much the same way as if you are writing the admission test this year. Only and only if your scores are good, your dream of being part of PGDM 2019 at a good management institute shall come true because all top management institutes in India use CAT score as a deciding parameter for their PGDM admissions.

Since the Common Admission Test is going to be time bound, it becomes imperative for you to be able to judge quickly as to which questions you should attempt and which ones should you leave. If you have practiced enough, you would be in a better position to be able to do so. Ideally it is like a linear programming equation wherein you try to maximize the marks scored with ‘time’ as the constraint. So your main objective would be to come up with as many as right answers as possible with minimum number of wrong answers with the activity to be completed within a stipulated time.

As a thumb rule, you should keep in mind the below mentioned points while attempting the paper:

1. Not Sure about the answer: For Common Admission Test (CAT), we have +3 for a correct answer and -1 for an incorrect answer in case of Multiple Choice Questions. In case you are not sure about the answer, do try to eliminate the options that cannot be the answer for the question. If you are able to eliminate, say 2 out of 4 options, then you may choose one of the remaining options and doing so is most probably going to be in your favour. However, in case you are not able to eliminate any of the options, better not attempt the question.
2. Easy but Lengthy Questions: You need to practice well enough to identify these sort of questions at first go so that you attempt them at the end after you are done with questions that can be solved sooner. Sometimes a student may feel that a particular question is very easy but ends up solving the question in, say 4 minutes thereby losing on the precious time that may have been used to solve other questions. But to be in a position to identify these questions first up without wasting too much time, you need to take up lot of practice sessions.
3. No preconceived notions: Quite a few times, we are having pre conceived notions while attempting a paper. You should not leave a question just because it is from a particular section you generally find difficult. You need to decide purely based on merit. It may be possible that a particular question from your favorite section can be very difficult or lengthy whereas a difficult section could pose an easy question. In other words, it is important that you try to catch as many low-lying fruits as possible.
4. No Ego Issues: It may happen that you may get stuck up with a particular question and you make it a point to solve it anyhow. But if it is taking more time, don’t make answering that particular question an ego issue as it is going to consume more time thereby eating into probability of getting answers to other questions right. You need to understand the concept of sunk cost involved in economics or factory costing. If you have already spent 90 seconds on a particular question and are not able to get the answer, do not feel that those 90 seconds would get wasted if you do not get the answer and hence keep on trying even further. Those 90 seconds are doomed anyways, so you better leave that question and get ahead.

All said and done, it would better for you to keep on practicing mock tests so that you probably can do good in CAT exam, thereby, getting a good score so that you shall be able to pursue PGDM program from a very reputed institute like Asian Business School, Noida.