Build Section-Wise Strategy for CAT 2014

The CAT exam pattern has called for a twist again this year. With specific changes, the sectional time limit removal, increase in the number of questions and reduction in the time per question, now the CAT takers must relook at their strategy.

Let’s take a look at the impact of these changes section-wise:

Data Interpretation (DI) / Logical Reasoning (LR)-

The numbers of questions are likely to increase in these sections. The degree of difficulty is also expected to go down when compared to the earlier years. So it becomes imperative that you clearly devise your strategy to handle these “grouped” questions, else you can get stumped by the pressure of time.

Tips:

• First things first! Speed up your calculations and know the short cuts.
• Practice & practise. Knowing different types of questions and their tricks would give you more time at your disposal.
• If you look at the past five years of CAT, one had time at one’s disposal. That is not likely to be the case this year. So make sure that you have had sufficient practice of the sets of DI with intense calculations.
• A thorough analysis of questions and intelligent guesswork are keys to improve your scores in such of questions.
• Just as in the case of quant, the key to increasing attempts in DI is by using smart approaches i.e. estimating the answers and not necessarily working out the exact answer.
• The second is getting sufficient exposure to a variety of LR/DI sets. The logical reasoning type DI questions can be very tricky. The ability to organise data depends on creating enough templates in your mind for managing the information.

There are various types of LR questions such as:

• Assignment type questions
• Arrangement type questions
• Mathematical reasoning type of questions

Data Sufficiency (DS) Questions:

• DS is likely to make a comeback this year. It is likely that you would find three to five DS questions this year.
• So, conceptually if your quant skills are good, you would find that there can be high accuracy in the DS questions.
• To crack the DS questions, it is important not to solve the questions. You need to solve only when you realise that the number of “solutions” or “cases” are “limited”.
• There could be a catch in the solutions that makes it an imperative that you solve them. Otherwise DS questions are not to be solved but to be analysed only for the “sufficiency” of the information.
• So you can take away that your basic calculations and the knowledge of the type of questions is going to be the key for these topics in CAT 2014.

Good Luck and get cracking!

Source: HT Education & Career Launcher Expert