T o crack any competitive test, especially the mother of all competitive tests in India — the CAT, managing time is very essential. Even an excellent student with extraordinary abilities without managing his time will not be able to crack it, whereas an average student with proper time management and selection of right questions will crack the CAT.
Time management is not just managing the allotted time for the test; it also pertains to managing the time put into preparation for the test. Whatever is their profile, CAT aspirants should identify their strong and weak areas among VA, RC, DI, LR and QA. They should ensure that they spend more time practicing their weak areas and at the same time not neglecting their strong areas. Else, over a period of time their strong areas may become weak while the weak areas become strong.
In CAT there is a sectional time limit and a pre-allotted sectional sequence. The students cannot do anything about it. The CAT pattern is predetermined and will not change, for each of the three sections the time is 60 minutes, so students have to practice accordingly.
In the CAT, students need to ensure that they attempt and answer all the easy questions in each section within the time allotted for the section. Once they are done with the easy questions, they can proceed to answering the more difficult ones, if time permits. To be able to do this, one has to attempt questions selectively, judging their difficulty level while reading them. The cardinal rule is to not miss out on any easy questions. So how does the student not miss out on easy questions? The student has to look at each question and decide on the spot, based on the area/topic/concept of the question and the student’s familiarity with it, whether the question is to be attempted or dropped. Only those questions that look doable are to be attempted. By doing so, the student can reach the end of the paper in time and hence, ensure that the no easy question gets missed. After reaching the end of the paper, a second pass is to be made to now pick the easier questions out of those that are left. As many passes such as these are to be made ensuring that the easiest of the remaining questions are done in every pass. Thus, the student will ensure that at any point in time, he/she is working only on the easiest questions in the paper.
An “easy” question is called so because it takes less time to solve. Hence, the number of attempts goes up. Also, because the question is easy, the chances of going wrong on it also goes down, specifically compared to the “not-easy” questions, pushing both the number of attempts and accuracy up at the same time.
Essentially, it’s the candidate’s state of mind which plays a key role so keep a cool head, ignore all the hype and hoopla and focus only on the CAT.