[raghav507]

hi puys,
here's another article from Arun Sharma, hope it helps...

Word Wise

THE LANGUAGE SECTION OF THE CAT TESTS A CANDIDATES PROFICIENCY IN ENGLISH AT VARIOUS LEVELS,INCLUDING HIS/HER EXPERTISE IN THE USAGE AND COMPREHENSION OF WORDS. ARUN SHARMA OFFERS TIPS THAT CAN HELP YOU INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER FOR THE CAT

You can adopt two kinds of strategies to improve your test scores in the verbal ability and reading comprehension section of the CAT short-term strategies and medium to long-term strategies. No matter which strategy you decide to adopt, it is crucial to remember that your ability to read and comprehend English depends on your efficiency in the language at various levels. Thus, in order to improve your scores, it is imperative that you gauge your expertise at each of these levels.

LANGUAGE LEVELS

Generally, aptitude exams like the CAT, test a candidates proficiency at each of the following levels: word level, sentence level (viz multiple words), paragraph level (multiple sentences) and passage level (multiple paragraphs). Besides, these tests also assess your expertise at the chapter level (multiple passages) and book level (multiple chapters ). In this article, we will be focusing on how to maximize your word power.

WORD POWER

Over the past few years, CAT and other management entrance exams in India have laid more emphasis on a candidates functional knowledge of words rather than his/her ability to memorise words by rote learning.
Here is what you need to do in order to improve your comprehension of words:

1.
Know your current ability Judge the level of your vocabulary through your understanding of general articles in a newspaper or a magazine. Any newspaper or magazine article is written for the average reader. Hence, if you are unable to comprehend such an article, it indicates that you have a poor vocabulary. So make a note of the number of words you fail to understand in an article of around 1000 words. While doing this, there might be two types of words you will be struggling to understand: Words that you don't know but can understand because of its context in the passage Words that you are unfamiliar with and that prove as a hurdle to your comprehension of the passage The number of words in both the above mentioned categories would give you an indication of the level of your vocabulary. A person with good skills in language would be able to go through a 1000-1500 word passage and come across a maximum of nine words that he or she does not understands. A newspaper would be perfect to start with. In fact, if you conduct an analysis of the CAT and other management aptitude exams, and evaluate the kind of words they required students to be familiar with over the last few years, you would realise that there is actually no word that you might miss out on, if you read an English daily for a period of six to 12 months.

2.
Note down the words and memorise their meanings not through dictionary definitions, but by attaching a visual value to each word

3.
It might also be a good idea to look up the thesaurus and group words with similar meanings so that you can memorise more words through one word Perform this exercise until you reach a point where the number of unknown words, in every 1000-1500 word article, comes down to a single digit number. Lastly, apart from words, you should also look at developing your knowledge of English by going through idioms, phrases and phrasal verbs. Refer to a good dictionary or a list of phrasal verbs, which you could download from the internet, for this purpose.

(The author is an IIM Bangalore alumnus, CEO Mindworkzz, Tata McGraw Hills online CAT Training venture, and the author of a series of bestselling books on CAT by Tata McGraw Hill)

[tejashreedb]

Hi frnds,
I am giving CAT this year. I have opted for AIMCAT. TIME has uploaded some tests on students' home page. There are 2 types of tests MCs and CRTs. The issue is i get good score in MCs but not in actual AIMCAT :( . Can anyone please help me understand the difficulty level of each of these types?

[Phoenix???]

Hi peeps...

dunno if its too late a query... bbut is it possible that any of u have the ims mocks with u... and can share it...
plssssssssssssss... i m actually really desp 2 get my hands on the ims mocks.. and have tried my level best but 2 no avail..
plss puys.. do help:helpsmili e:

[mohit28sharma]

Originally Posted by mohantg

TODAY,I HAVE RECEIVED ADMIT CARD SUDDENLY TO MY MAIL INBOX WHICH CONTAINS "ASIA PACIFIC INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT" WITH CENTRE CODE "IILEB" WHICH WAS NEVER SELECTED BY ME.

I HAD SELECTED "FORTUNE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS"HAVING TEST CENTRE CODE"IILK8".ALSO I WOULD LIKE TO STATE THAT I HAVE NEVER RESCHEDULED MY APPOINTMENT.

ALSO THE SO-CALLED NEW ADMIT CARD MENTIONS THE SAME TELEPHONE NUMBER OF THE ORIGINALLY SELECTED FORTUNE INSTITUE OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS.
Anybody facing similar problems??.
What is to be done now??Is Prometric doing a good job??

What will do during and after the test??I am worried because what i have not done is coming out to me as if i had resecheduled the appointment!!

What if my test is also screwed up like this???What i have done has been changed unilaterally by Prometric

Any help please!!

i am facing a similar situation man...

[sourav_ghosh]

Originally Posted by cena_chain

Puys,

I received an email from TIME saying that there is a 'chance' that there won't be any clear button in the real CAT. Once the option is chosen, it can be changed number of times but cannot be left unanswered. Also a few days earlier I had read an article in ET saying that the options cannot be changed at all once answered..!

P.S. - This might have been discussed in this post earlier, but I just couldn't hold back after reading the email.

heyy puy!!...i gone thru d same article in ET...clearly stating that the answer once is given..can be altered..but cannot be cleared!!!.....another tough decision by IIM's???

[vadaysakiv]

hi puys
although i am not weak in any of the section and peformed well over 98%ile in each one time or the other ,but it doesnt happen simultaneously.
i mean in prock mock 7 i crashed in di--(-1)
2 days before in online mock i had scored 99+%ile in it
same has happened at times in qa&va.
is it lack of straregy ,concentration or what coz i have good control on concepts.
plz help

[tituspinto]

A good article on how to prepare for Quant in the last month:

MBA Test Prep Strategies Strategies by CAT 100-PERCENTILERS - Article on Verbal Ability, DI & LR, Quantitative Ability, and GD PI

[raghav507]

hi puys,
sorry for the late post...
here's the new article from Arun Sharma...

Score with sentences

ONCE YOU HAVE STRENGTHENED YOUR VOCABULARY, THE NEXT STEP IS TO HONE YOUR SKILLS IN READING AND COMPREHENDING COMPLICATED SENTENCES, SAYS ARUN SHARMA.

LAST week, we dealt with the basic level of language development, namely, studying words, and focusing on developing your active vocabulary, standard word usage, phrasal verbs, etc. The next level of language development is concerned with sentence and paragraph comprehension .
Comprehension is crucial when it comes to cracking the verbal section of CAT. Your ability to understand long complex sentences and paragraphs can be seen to be the defining skill that can boost your scores.

SAMPLE FROM CAT 2006

He has chosen a good year for his ideological offensive: this is the 50anniversary of Nikita Khrushchevs denunciation of Josef Stalin and the subsequent Hungarian uprising, which will doubtless be the cue for further excoriation of the communist record. Paradoxically, given that there is no communist government left in Europe outside Moldova, the attacks have, if anything, become more extreme as time has gone by. A clue as to why that might be, can be found in the rambling report by Mr Lindblad that led to the Council of Europe declaration. Blaming class struggle and public ownership , he explained, different elements of communist ideology such as equality or social justice still seduce many, and a sort of nostalgia for communism is still alive. Perhaps the real problem for Mr Lindblad and his right-wing allies in Eastern Europe is that communism is not dead enough and they will only be content when they have driven a stake through its heart.

If you count the number of words in the paragraph provided above, you will notice that it has 160 words in five sentences , which means the average length of sentences in the paragraph is 32 words per-sentence . However, an average CAT aspirant may only be comfortable with up to 15 to 20 words per-sentence . To add to this dilemma, students might be completely unfamiliar with the topic of the passage. Its no surprise then that even students coming from an English medium background have a difficult time tackling this section. Hence, what you need to do is focus on developing your ability to understand longer sentences from complex and diverse topics. A good starting for you is to improve your understanding of content and language in the following areas:

Economics
Philosophy
Politics
Psychology
Socio-political issues
Biology and medicine
Sociology and civilizations
Art and culture
Science and technology

Since it may be difficult to read up all the above mentioned subjects, a feasible approach is to read extracts (paragraphs and passages) from each of these areas. This exercise will ensure that you become familiar with the typical style of writing that you are likely to experience in CAT and other aptitude exams.

The author is an IIM Bangalore alumnus, CEO Mindworkzz, Tata McGraw Hills online CAT Training venture, and the author of a series of bestselling books on CAT by Tata Mcgraw Hill

[raghav507]

Hi puys,
here's a new article from Arun Sharma...

The perfect strategy

SCORING IN CAT IS AS MUCH ABOUT THE QUESTIONS YOU ATTEMPT AS IT IS ABOUT THOSE YOU DONT , SAYS ARUN SHARMA.

Not all your preparation for CAT has to focus on improving your abilities in each section, during the last month of preparation. Starting this week, we focus on the concrete steps you could take to develop your test scores without tinkering with your ability.

QUANTITATIVE APTITUDE

1. Improve your ability to select what you know and leave out what you do not:
In an exam where the required scores for achieving a percentile of 99 rarely cross the 35-45 % range, perfect knowledge is not the pre-requisite to clear it. In fact, you can easily crack the CAT even if you solve around 40% of the questions in an average test.

A good way to gauge your potential to crack the exam would be to pick 10-20 test papers and divide your QA section into blocks of five questions each. If, for every five QA questions, you can solve more than two questions on an average, you should focus on developing your ability to decide whether you can solve a particular question, while reading it for the first time. This will help you attempt only those questions that you can actually solve during the test.

For this, you need to clearly define three types of outcomes after reading a question for the first time:

a) I see a clear flowchart and the steps are manageable : you must certainly attempt these questions.

b) I see a clear flowchart but the steps are too lengthy: In this case, you need to determine whether or not to attempt the problem depending on the time you have.

c) I do not see a clear flowchart but I see a starting point: This is potentially the most dangerous situation, as once you start solving the question you may lose track of time. Thus, do not even attempt such questions.

d) I see no flowchart and no starting point to the question: Needless to mention, you should not attempt such questions. In fact, since these kinds of problems are limited to around 20-30 %, you need not worry about them.

While taking the exam, divide your QA section into four blocks of five questions, each spread over approximately 11 solving minutes (assuming the number of questions in the QA section would be 20).

Look through five questions at a time and categorise them into the above four categories before you start solving them. The solving order should be categorised as category A questions followed by category B questions. If, after solving these questions, you still have time, utilise it to solve the next block of questions.

(The author is an IIM Bangalore alumnus, CEO Mindworkzz, Tata McGraw Hills online CAT Training venture, and the author of a series of bestselling books on CAT byTata Mcgraw Hill)

[tejashreedb]

Did anyone get hall ticket for XAT, JMET, IBSAT, SNAP etc.? Can we get the hall tickets online?