[arati]

Hi all,
Truly impressed by chandoo's post, like I guess everyone on this thread is.
Thought I would share my CAT experience with all of yu. I finished my engineering in 2004, so in my final year when I gave the CAT, we were the lucky batch who got to give the CAT twice( one in Nov 2003 then in Feb 2004). I knew I was good with the verb section, worked hard on quant and DI. That year had one of the easiest DI's of all time. Hardly any calculations and very little in terms of logical analysis. It was more about just going through some tables and solving some very easy questions. And i made soo many silly errors in that. my percentile slipped to a 98.18 with a split as follows:
Quant : 99.91
Verba : 99.48
DI : 31.47 ( That is not my percentage score, thats my percentile!!!! )
And if you thought that would be the end of my stupid oversights....well...you are wrong.
After college, I joined Infosys, and planned to give the CAT again . Only CAT, didnt apply for any other colleges, thought pushing a 98.18%ile to a 99+ shudnt be too tuff. Submitted the form ( for CAT Nov-2004), and on the first week of november logged into their site to check the status. My form was rejected because I hadnt signed anywhere on it. The whole form is to be filled using a Pencil, except the disclaimers and the signature next to the Address Box with a Black ball pen. In Both places I hadnt signed! They rejected my form. I called up my elder sister who was in IIM-A that time, asked her if anything could be done. Well she tried, but it was only 12 days to the CAT. It was wayyyy too late to do anything. So that was it, second attempt at CAT and what an anti-climactic no show!!!

Didnt want to lose touch with my preperations, so gave the XAT, the only exams whose forms were available at that time. Cleared the XAT. Didnt get through the interview, simply because I didnt even prepare, something that I will avoid this time around.
This year, for CAT- Nov-2005, bought the form. Filled it carefully. Xeroxed it and kept a copy. Scanned it to my friends and had it proof-read. And kept checking their site to see the form status. The sheer joy I felt on the day it was accepted, didnt even feel that great after getting the iim-a gd/pi call!

Gave the XAT as well, cleared that too. So basically after that one fiasco for CAT-Nov-2004 all the tests where I have signed on the form I have been able to clear. So basically, the most critical aspect of my preparation was signing!!! So ladies and gentlemen, kindly do not waste any time...and practice your signatures. Bring out the black ball pens and sign on every empty scrap of paper you see..!!!!
Thats what I have learnt...and I am passing my wisdom along!!!

[DesiGuru]

In the US there is a calculation on the time duration of an exam/credit course and the number of hours that needs to be spent for that.

The amount of time people spend on studying for this exam is a national waste and I would put the total value wasted upwards of 100 crores every year. I am not kidding here. I am not counting the lowered self esteem and the losing of self worth that will come to the majority after writing this exam...

For a 2 hour exam I would say studying for more than 100 hours will actually hurt your performance because of the undue anxiety it creates on the day of the exam...

Personally I wrote 14 AIMCATS in a real test environment and looked at 2 other AIMCAT papers casually at home... Probably one more hour each paper for analysis at home done thoughtfully but not entirely wholesome...

I definitely did not solve all the problems in the AIMCAT papers... The many i did not solve in the exam were forever left unsolved... other than a few questions here and there...

Also looked at CAT 2004... All the questions... Did not touch probability or permutations etc... Casually did a few questions from previous years CAT papers

All my actual preparation for the CAT like looking at previous years questions for the CAT was in the last two weeks before CAT. YES that is 100% honest.
And in this time i was actually lookin at some fun books in math and general reading actually... Used this time to solve maybe 50+ CAT math problems in total... Absolutely very few questions of verbal or di done in total... In the last month i was glancing through 5 odd interesting books just for fun and as in supposed preparation for EU
Ofcourse I was wasting(?) time on the forum all the time

I could say I slogged real hard in the last two days before CAT. Slogged as in upto 10 hours each on the last two days... purely because I knew i was not upto it in the math and had forgotten the concepts and had lost my great touch in math

Remember that in the end... you are on in each section for 40 minutes
Yes in the end for a 40 minute section most of you have wasted an entire year... In this small period... your prep hardly matters... Luck being a key factor what matters is how you instinctively spot the questions you could answer and persist just enough to solve them...
What matters most is the split second decision to leave a question or answer it... What matters is if you have the guts to decide right there that it would be crazy to attempt that second RC even though all previous CATs had 5 and attempting atleast 3 or more of them was extremely important... What matters most is maybe a real time decision that this time maybe 40 minutes for each section is a bad idea...

So all your yearly prep is not only an absolute waste of time beyond a certain level of prep but it actually makes you anxious, nervous and apprehensive in those crucial 2 hours of mini decision making...

So think wisely and look around you... There might be far more interesting things to do than slogging 4 hours a day which in the end is actually harmful to your chances...

At the end of the day those who have studied an entire year sloggin 3-4 horus a day would have still got the same score if they had studied for less than 1 hour a day... but ofcourse there is no way it can be convincingly proved...
But remember that there are a lot more people who slog 3-6 hours a day and dont get a good score...

Just at the end of the day you only hear from the successful people who say hey I worked real hard and I cracked the CAT. What you dont hear is the guy who is equally intelligent and worked equally hard but did not make it...

What I am saying is that your prep means shit after a certain reasonable limit whether in the end you crack it or dont

K

[Eccentric001]

i have read a lot of posts stating that CAT is a test of yout intelligence!!IS IT???

my batchmates in my college (especially ppl from the north) were xtremely good in mechanics(dese guys try for years and thn get into REC),they were abslutely brilliant and never even once did they mention that they had studied these subjects bfore, for their entrance!!!
one day we had a lecture from a prof , he is also the visiting faculty at MIT,and he is an absolute gem.HE said dat "no one is born intelligent..if some one says that he knows mechanics or for that matter ne subject without ne prior studying of that subject,he is lying"..very very true..soon i found dat all my frnds had actually studied these subjects while preparing for their entrance.

ppl who claim to have cracked cat without ne prior preparation,its very hard to believe!!...Is cat an exam dats tests ur intelligence???absolutely not!!!
Its an elimination round dat tests ones skills in maths,di and eng...

the guys who bell the cat without ne solid preps for it, definitely have honed their maths and eng skills over a period of time,mite be during their engg,during school or during their preps for JEE...which guys like me have not(a big mistake)..
nobody is born knowing CAT maths or english,its improved over the years..

taking 2 years to get those skills back(during cat attempts) ,rather to improve such skills does not make ne1 a bad manager!!!!!its jus paying for the mistakes u have committed earlier on....

P.S---this is in reply to ppl who claim dat cracking cat with 3 years of preps makes them bad managers.

[hareshmandani]

Hi to all,

My preparation has been much like that of Chandu. Yes, those two hours in the exam hall are utmost important. Don't take any risk there and esp. not of attempting too many questions. But it is not as easy as it looks. We(especially I ) can't stop attempting more questions. I knew I had messed up by attempting 'too many' questions in a couple of simCATs, but I repeated the same mistake in the real CAT-05 and the rest is NOT A HISTORY. I could get only 85 percentlile while those of my friends who used to get similar percentile to mine got 95-99 %ile. So guys, be satisfied with the number of questions you can handle and don't try to mess up on your accuracy.

[kushalc]

Originally Posted by BLACK CAT

This is 11th April 2006 and tomorrow I shall know my fate. Fate, as always, is not without a sense of irony. The choices that we make come and haunt us everyday. I'm feeling the usual butterflies in my stomach but honestly I don't care. I don't care about the results as they don't matter to me anymore. I have not found salvation or something, I just don't care.

May be I shall not convert any one of the call.
So what ?
I shall not die.
The world will not stop.
My parents will not start hating me.

Ok, I shall get that sympathy look in other people's eyes and I won't be able to stand it. But I can always take my eyes away it. Why should I care?

If you care you get disappointed all the time.

Yes Sir, totally agreed. Me too facing D-Day tomorrow. But as you put it, even the worst will not mean the end of the world! So lets chill out! And hope for the best!

As far as my view of the CAT goes, I believe with the amount of publicity that it has got in the last few years, you just can't expect it to retain the same pattern next year. The last two years have progressively made us concentrate on accuracy more than speed. Especially CAT 2005. So now, all the coaching classes will start flooding the students with similar mock tests. And the students will be geared up for accuracy. And that's exactly the reason why I expect CAT2006 to revert back to the larger number of questions format. Just to throw all calculations into disarray.
Having said all this, I sincerely hope I won't need to appear for it again!!

Cheers and Good Luck!

[The Raven]

May 2004 - I had 2 calls - XLRI, IIM-K. Failed to convert both. Chandoo posted his experience on this thread. Highly inspiring. I dreamt one day I would post here.

May 2006 - I have final admits from IIM - A, C, I, XIM-B, MDI. Waitlisted at L.
And I am going to post my 'experiments with CAT' in a triology of 5 posts.

[The Raven]

Oct 2003 - Realization dawned upon me that I was heading nowhere in life. I had been working at Infosys for 2.5 years. Done nothing great and
saw no scope of doing anything in the future. I considered various options and conclude that MBA in India was the most feasible ones. Luckily I had already applied to CAT just to satisfy my parents.

My idea about CAT at that stage - A silly exam where one has to solve hundreds of maths problems in a limited time. Speed was never my forte.Thats why I had never given CAT in all the previous years.

My idea about MBA - The domain of pseud guys. Outside the ambit of introvert, down to earth guys like me.Did not even know that there was an IIM at Indore. Never heard of FMS, XLRI, MDI or IIFT.

I decided to join some coaching institute to get myself acquainted with the syllabus. But by then the last date for registration even for crash courses was past. At last found an institute 'Scholar's League' which was starting a weekend crash course. There people told me that XL was a good institute too and I applied for XAT too.

The coaching institute was run by grads who had done their BTech from IIT and MBA from IIM-L. They were quite good and it being a new institute, the batch strenth was 5 of whom none were serious aspirants. But I got good personal attention and was able to get a good feel of
what CAT exam was all about.

Then came the actual day of CAT. Went in expecting some surprises. But exam turned out to be an anti climax with the same old pattern of 3 sections having 50 questions each, similar to the previous years' papers and the Mock CATs. The climax however came after the exam when news came out that the paper had got leaked and the exam had got cancelled. My luck. Every time I take a exam, the paper gets leaked and exam gets cancelled. Same thing had happened to me in my IIT JEE also.

Meanwhile I wrote XAT. XAT paper was fantastic. The GK paper had humorous quotations which had to be completed and I really enjoyed those, though I has never heard the quotations before. After cracking the GK section, moved on to English. Here again I was delighted to find most of the passages from Shakespere as I was very comfortable with Shakesperean language. By the time, I came to quant, I could not believe I was doing so well in XAT that I wasted 5 minutes feeling surprised before I got back to solving the problem sets on probability, combinations, number series etc. I guess the minutes wasted reflected on my Quant score, which was a mere 80 percentile. But the final results turned out good fro me. I had 99 percentile in XAT, with 99 in GK, 98 in Verbal and 80 in Quant. Got a call from XLRI, Jamshedpur for the PM & IR course.

Having got a call from XLRI, I was no longer that desperate for CAT. But anyway took TIME Mock CATs for the re-exam. Was consistently ranked outside the top 3000. Then came CAT again. Once again it was the same 3 section paper and my performance was very similar to my first time. The IIMs seemed to have run out of ideas.

Let me take a chronological break here and move on to the CAT results. I had managed 97.45 percentile with 98 in verbal, 92 in DI and 77 in Quant. Inspite of low CAT score, I got a call from IIM-K.

So that was my tally for the year - XLRI PM & IR, IIM-K.

I will continue with my GD/PI experiences in the next post. I have been dreaming of writing this for the past 2 years from the day I read Chandoo's posts. So its going to be a bit long winded and span across posts.

[sahilgoyal]

November 2003 - First Attempt at CAT .. in my final year with 0 preparation -> 92.1%ile ... obsviously no calls :neutral:

November 2004 - Second Attempt at CAT .. in my first year at job and with the help of time test series -> 95.8%ile ... obsviously no calls :neutral:

December 2004 - Joined Pagalguy.

August 2005 - My Project manager messed up my yearly appraisal.

November 2005 - Third Attempt at CAT .. frustrated with a bad yearly appraisal -> saw no future in IT -> with the help of time test series and CL coaching -> 99.86%ile ... Calls : IIM B, I, K and MDI.

Jan 2006 - Enrolled with Mr. Malay Ray and converted IIM I, K and MDI. Though the IIM B nightmare PI is still bugging me .... but just had a bad day. :(

[mayank92]

My journey to IIM-C

The IIMs had always been a dream for me. My first attempt at the CAT (the entrance exam for the IIMs) was in 2003. Had prepared a lot for it and had a good exam. But the moment I came out of the examination halls, I heard that my effort had been a wasted one, for the CAT papers had been leaked, and the CAT would be reconducted.

The CAT was reconducted in Feb 2004. But somehow, I just couldn’t motivate myself for the same level of preparation. I don’t know whether it was the frustration of the wasted effort, or just my usual complacent attitude, but I wasn’t motivated enough to take the retest. Even with the half-hearted approach, I managed to secure 98.82 percentile. I would have managed to get a few GD/PI calls from some of the IIMs, had it not been for a technicality called sectional cut-offs. My percentile in one of the sections was too low. A case of so-near-yet-so-far!...................(More)

[arvind_scra]

I am an SCRA and would (have) soon joine (ed) the Indian railways as class I gazetted officer. After clearing UPSC in 2002 I knew I could clear any exam (boastfull eh?) and thus decided not o join any coaching!!In any case near Jamalpur (SCRA training centre) there IS no coaching insti. On 20 Nov 2005 I was at jamshedpur for CAT. While my exam was decent enuf, my mobile was stolen from putside the test center and hence my day turned out to be really baaaad!!! I knew that this is one exam I would not make !!! However on2 Jan 2006 my comp told me that I have qualified for 5 IIM gd/pi (all except IIMA). i was ecstatic. I had no access to any coaching insti/mentor/senior etc. Also I was a bit complacent due to my existing career. still I appeared for my gds with only my parent's advices for the possible questions and answerr. As luck wud have it I converted IIMC,I,L(w/l)
I still maintain my IIMB pi was great but god prbbly wanted me to be nearer to home hence JOKA here I come.
TO all CAT aspirants, it does not matter if you make it to IIMs or not. I still feel they are a little overhyped!!! It is the input that you have given that matters.
A coaching insti may help you get into an IIM, but remember in life there is no coaching to take you forward(no offences to neone). Believe in yourself and u'll make it to the top.
I go to IIMCal not dreaming of stratospherically high salary but of learning something new. (I mean it guys believe me!!!)]
Best of luck to you all,
Ram Ram
Arvind