Should have posted this way back, anyway doing it now. Its about my preparation for CAT.
My first attempt was in 2006 during the final year of engineering. Preparation started of in May with an intense 5 day study of quant and di from a Career Launcher book for MBA entrance exams which i found in the Fort area of Mumbai. Those 5 days were my first and last serious attempt of preparation for CAT that year. After hols i was back in college and there was a free all india mock in july and i got 98+%, while a year ago in a similar free mock i had scored 90%. So i got a 50% discount and joined the aimcat series. I used to write the mocks very seriously till i got placed in September; always scoring 96%+ with the best rank of air 48. But i rarely used to clear DI cutoffs and never reviewed my mistakes or attempted the unanswered questions. After placement, i lost interest and could never get into the 'zone' in exam and mock % started declining to 93%+. Finally in the real CAT, i basically screwed up with a 90% overall and a shocking 75% in both di and quant and 98% in verbal.Then i joined a software company in 2007, and focused on doing well in my role and learning about programming and embedded systems and was enjoying the work. I wasn't sure what future path to take and hence did not apply anywhere for higher education.
In July 2008, after 1 year of thinking about gre\mba\better job in MS,Amazon etc i decided to give CAT with the aim of getting into iima or iimc. Wrote a free mock with the hope of discount but scored only 96%, so had to pay full amount for the aimcats. I started reading
The Economist magazine: contents page | The Economist,
The New Yorker and practiced atleast 1 puzzle daily. The main difference this time was that i used to review each mock cat for atleast 10 hrs (includes time for revising 2-3 times). So i was improving with each test and started gaining confidence that this would be the first and last serious attempt on CAT. Another major difference was i used to follow mock cat review discussions on
PaGaLGuY.com - India's biggest CAT 2009, MBA website by spending at least 1 hr after each test reading strategies and mistakes of the forum members.
Though on average i spent less than 45 min daily for the preparation, i was doing very well with scores >98%. But the DI scores were pathetic again; i just hated the section and found it painful to spend time in it; the lowest di score being a 57%. Slowly through the mock cat reviews i was gaining confidence as i could solve problems after spending lot of time for each one. But even in September scores in DI were always <92%.
To lose the DI fear, i took xerox of all previous year aimcat tests and started off in earnest, putting in 2 hours daily. But in mid september i had to go to S.Korea for 1.5 months for the final stage of a project i was working on. Luckily i had more spare time in Korea than in India, but was unable to motivate myself to prepare due to various distractions.
Only in the last week of my stay, i got scared and started DI again and surprisingly after the 5 week break from studies, i was easily able to solve the DI sets. I also realized that my order of VA,QA,DI may not be the right one; so i decided that first i have to attempt the 2nd strongest section QA first, then weakest section of DI and finally my strength - VA (Never got <98.5%). After coming back in Oct end; i was able to try the new strategy (I had tried the earlier one for all the mocks i had written - 20+) and got 98% in the last 2 mocks; but again got <95% in di. But somehow i was very confident and felt that i would crack the CAT if i was able to enter the 'zone' and attempt all the easy questions first.
D-Day - The centre was hard to find and very far away, but as i started early at 7 am i reached the centre 1 hour before the exam. It was a school and my room was a class for 4 th class students; so the seating was very uncomfortable. As we were waiting for the papers, I started to focus only on the exam and did not think about external disturbances (entering the zone
...in every other exam i would have a random topic at the back of my mind). Gave 35 minutes for QA and did 8 questions, then gave 55 min for DI and attempted 13, got a feeling that each one of my attempts was right. Then spent 45 minutes on VA and did 24 questions. Now comes the most critical part; in the last 30 minutes i was a bit distracted and was slow. I had 15 minutes left after VA and knew that only if i attempt 3-4 questions more in QA, i could clear the cutoff. I tried 4-5 which seemed easy but could do only 2 of them (Damn, was getting out of the 'zone'
). The time was up and the invigilator started collecting the papers and i was in the 3rd last bench; i knew i had to attempt 1 more question at least. It was a geometry question, and 2 options were eliminated by quick substitution and one of the remaining options felt like it was the right one; so i circled it.
Result -
QA - 10C, 1W - 39 - 96.02 - A cut off - 37 -geometry question was correct
DI - 13 C, 0 W - 52 - 99.64
VA - 18C, 6 W - 66 - 98.72
Overall - 157 - 99.76% - BLACKI calls - AIK converts
Help
........But as all of my friends were joining TIME so I did too.The weekend classes were just a formality for me as faculty used to come from Kolkata(as I was studying at NIT jamshedpur) nd I was never too serious though I had my ambitions at the back of my mind.So, hurridly came the september of 2009 and I started thinking to be a little serious.I filled CAT,IIFT nd JMET skipping XAT nd FMS thinking of my incompetency.I had my mock percentiles in the range of 94 which prompted me to become a little more serious as I was performing beyond my own expectation.I had my only target set on IMT so I filled IMT form.The doomsday arrived and I knew that I hadn't done that bad.I checked out my score nd it was going to be around 125
.So, I started thinking that I had good enough chance for SP jain call too so, I filled in that after the CAT xam.This way around I had already missed MDI nd NITIE forms which I was really repenting on.The result came nd I had scored 98.37%ile 
the IITM interview as I had to attend it in Chennai.So, I attended the IMT nd SP jain interviews but could convert onli IMT-G.As my confidence was high enough I took a brave decision of not joining IMT-G nd give one more try at better colleges.This way I thought of writing CAT,XAT nd FMS 2010 seriously with 2 yrs of work-ex which would give me a fair chance.By the way I changed my mind nd writing CAT 2009,XAT,FMS nd JMET (strange choices....forms updated) 
Linear Mode
