BENGALURU: The preparation strategies of the state’s top performers in the Common Entrance Test (CAT) suggests an approach for effective and smart studying, rather than putting in a lot of hours. The results for CAT, the entrance exam for MBA courses at the country’s premier institutes, were announced on Monday. A total of 1,99,632 candidates appeared for the test across 140 centres on November 26, 2017. The number of people who scored a perfect 100 percentile in the country was 20, which also included two women and three candidates from non-engineering backgrounds.
Kumar Ravi (24), a native of Bihar’s Munger district, was the highest scorer in Karnataka with a score of 99.99 percentile. Kumar, a mechanical engineer by qualification, quit his job at Fevilite Industries in February 2017 and started his preparations in May.Kumar credits his parents — both teachers — for not putting him under any kind of pressure and keeping faith in him. Regarding his strategy, he said, “I scored well by being very practical. I got a low score of 92 percentile in one of the earlier mock tests, and acted on it. I basically took feedback from everything that happened around me.”
Kumar, a student of T.I.M.E institute, put in 3-4 hours per day for his preparation. Owing to his comparatively low score in class XII exams, Kumar did not get short-listed for IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Bangalore, and has set his sights on IIM-Calcutta and Faculty of Management Studies, New Delhi.Ashok Suresh Das (22), a native of Thiruvananthapuram, scored a 99.97 percentile despite juggling his preparations with a 4-year undergraduate programme at IISc, Bengaluru.
Currently a 4th year student of Civics Majors, Das roots his success to his habits of reading a lot and solving puzzles during childhood. He enrolled for coaching and could not attend classes regularly due to his classes at IISc, but did attend every mock test. The 22-year-old is gunning for an admission in IIM-Ahmedabad, for which he has been short-listed. “But I am still not 100 per cent sure whether I will do an MBA or a PhD in Civics,” he said.
Ayan Chakraborty (23), a graduate from IIT-Kharagpur, has achieved the impressive feat of getting short-listed for all the three premier IIMs — Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata — with a percentile of 99.85. Throughout his preparation, and even now, he is working as software engineer for Samsung and credits the coaching from Career Launcher Institute for his success.