The majority of the management entrance exams include the Logical Reasoning (LR) and Data Interpretation (DI) section. This is considered one of the most difficult sections in these exams. CAT is one of the most popular exams in India for MBA education.
The exam apportions around one-third of the total score to this section. The section evaluates students based on their decision-making capability, data interpretation skills, and problem-solving speed. No committees conducting these exams have a fixed syllabus for this section.
It is pertinent that students understand this section and practice to improve their LDRI skills. Aspirants must understand and learn about different question templates of CAT.
With the increasing competition and subsequently increasing difficulty of the exam, the distinction between LD and RI problems has become difficult. Studying this section has become tougher.
Problems typically encountered by students
- Being one of the most unpredictable sections, LRDI is the one section that requires students to practice a diverse range and types of problems. Most problem sets may fail to consider diversity, and thus, practice problems tend to be either easy or difficult. This fails to prepare candidates with the right mindset when approaching these sections. To appropriately understand and adopt the right thought process to an LRDI set, candidates must ensure to include a diverse range of practice questions.
- Another problem prominently encountered by the students is the selection of the right sets. In contrast to the Quant section, the problems in the LRDI section are present in sets, and thus, selecting a wrong set would give you four questions that you might not be comfortable with. Thus, it is pertinent that candidates select an appropriate set according to their areas of strength and understanding.
Strategies to improve LRDI performance
- While solving the section, candidates must spend the first 10 min to review all the sets and skim to understand and estimate the manageable sets. Candidates should focus on the given data as well as the sub-questions, which are equally crucial. Further, the sets should be prioritized depending on your comfort and ease of managing.
- The LRDI section is quite difficult and unpredictable. Evidently, you may not be able to solve some questions. There is no need to panic in such moments as solving each problem accurately is nearly impossible. As such instances, one must show good judgment by identifying these questions as early as you can and moving on to the next problem. Spend around 4–5 min to evaluate whether a set is manageable or not. Once evaluated, do not dwell, but move on to the next good thing!
- Note that in CAT, it does not matter whether you solve a particular set as there is not weighted marking based on difficulty. This must be leveraged by the aspirants. Spot the easiest sets in the section, solve 14–16 questions accurately, which is an almost optimal scenario. For this, candidates can either select four sets and solve almost all questions, or they can solve approximately two questions from all eight sets.
- Approximation and rounding are generally adopted to increase the problem-solving speed in the LRDI section. However, one must be careful to avoid approximation in problems, where the options are too close. In such cases, approximation may only increase confusion and cause you to unnecessarily spend more time on one problem.
In summary, presence of mind and lots and lots of practice of a wide range of practice sets will help candidates set the right mindset for the LRDI section. We hope that these few strategies can help aspirants overcome their fear of this section to some extent and help them enhance their scores.
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