With few months left for the CAT Exam, all candidates should start giving their CAT Mocks. Candidates appearing for CAT tend to forget one major factor which leads to a low percentile. Every Candidate should analyze their mocks thoroughly. But before jumping on the analyzing part of the mock every CAT Aspirant needs to make sure they have their own strategies and shortcuts to solve CAT Mocks. The main objective of analyzing a mock test is to identify your strong and weak areas.
Steps to Analyse CAT Mocks-
Step 1: All Candidates should appear for CAT Mocks
A majority of the CAT Aspirants don’t give Mocks. Every Candidate has the temptation to start giving mocks ” next week” Before doing anything the candidates should get rid of procrastination.
Step 2: Scores
The next obstacle for the aspirants is giving CAT Mocks half-heartedly. Appearing for mocks just for the sake of it is something that the candidates should not do. This is less common than the first one but this issue also exists. Some students just ignore their scores and forget to analyze where they went wrong.
Step 3: Analyze your section, area and time-wise performance
When the candidates analyze the mocks the first thing to do is make a note of their weak and strong areas and also check which question was more time-consuming. Also try to gauge the amount of time you took to solve Reading Comprehensions.
Step-4: Re-solve the exam
Make sure to solve the questions that were not attempted, wrong and the questions where you didn’t get time to solve. Make a note of the questions that you are able to solve without the time pressure and see if you can solve the questions.Try to understand how you solved the paper in the first go and how you should have actually solved it. Identify the questions you missed out on, and try to segregate your silly mistakes.
Step-5: Make a cheat-sheet
Make a quick cheat-sheet of the all the things you learnt from the exam. This should include:
- Mathematics shortcuts
- Data interpretation tips and techniques
- Grammar and usage rules (new ones that you discovered in the exam)
- Words you learn from the exam
Step-6: Focus on Verbal Ability
Try to identify the different passage sources, and read further from these. Make a note of all the vocabulary based questions and different tones of the reading comprehension.
Step-7: Draw up a strategy for the next mock
On the basis of your current attempt, draw up a strategy for the next exam. Give yourself a series of directives to follow in the next exam, and see how it goes.
Step-8: Do give the next (Mock)
Remember one golden CAT prep rule: Candidates should understand Mocks are just like the net practice before the actual match. So use all the Mocks given and decide strategies and shortcuts to be used in actual CAT Exam.
Some more Guidelines:
1) Right your wrongs: Solve the questions for which you marked the wrong answer. Find out where you went wrong and learn whatever there is to learn about that concept. This will ensure that you do not make the same mistakes twice.
2) Types of wrongs: Not all the errors that you make are concept-based. Some errors may be just plain silly mistakes. While some errors may be due to a hasty approach and incorrect approximations. So always be aware of the type of errors that you make.
3) Attempts & Accuracy: Focus on how much you have attempted. Make a list of the number of questions that you attempted. Now, keep increasing this number in every successive mock. If the numbers aren’t increasing, focus on the speed of solving the questions. Simultaneously, along the list of the number of questions, keep noting down the accuracy of your answers. Now, as done for the number of questions, try to increase your accuracy in each successive mock.
For example, let’s say that an Logical Reasoning set took 10 mins with 3 correct answers out of 6. So, next time, your goal should be to finish the set within 7–8 mins with 4–5 correct attempts. Eventually keep decreasing the time and increasing the correct attempts.
This will make sure that you are progressing on the right track in your mock analysis.
4) Strengths & Weaknesses: Your first mock test will give you a hint about your strong and weak areas. Eventually, after analyzing some more mocks, you will have a good idea about these areas. Your strong areas are usually the ones that take less time to solve and are most of the times, right. Your weak areas are the ones that constantly have low accuracy
5) Notes: Write down the notes of what you learnt and keep them handy. These can include different tips and shortcuts for Quantitative Aptitude & Data Interpretation different approaches to LR, certain grammar rules, new words, etc.
6) Variance: If you are getting varying percentiles, then you have to speed up on your preparation.
7) Strategy: Finally, this is the most important aspect pertaining to mocks. Make a strategy before attempting a mock. After every mock, modify your strategy for the next mock. Keep on doing this until you develop the perfect strategy to increase your scores.
Remember, you will know when you have adopted the right strategy, once you know the following things:-
– What to Attempt
– When to Attempt
– How to Attempt
In the end, it isn’t about how many mocks you give. The real improvement is in what you do after the mock.
All the best!!
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Originally published at catking.in on February 13, 2019.