How to prepare for a CAT retake – Part III

How to prepare for a CAT retake- In the previous two posts, we discussed the mindset and the tools that you would need for a successful retake. In this post, we will take a look at the specific things you need to do for each section and area.

VERBAL Ability — Throw your prep net as wide as possible

Of all the things that make the CAT tough, it is the nature of the VERBAL Ability section that poses the biggest challenge. At some level, the way the CAT has tested VERBAL Ability over the years seems to filter out people whose VERBAL Ability is as much a function of their general proficiency with the English language and reading per se as much as it is a function of the amount of practice they have put in.

So in effect assured success on the VERBAL Ability will be a function of your natural ability with the language and your practice equipping you with the following knowledge & skills:

• An above average reading speed of 250-300 WPM
• A wide enough vocabulary of around 1500-2000 words
• The ability to apply Grammar rules pertaining to written English logical reasoning in a verbal context

While the CAT itself might not test all the above skills — Grammar questions, for example, did not feature in the last two editions of the CAT — between the other tests, XAT, IIFT, NMAT & SNAP, all of the skills above will get tested. So the first thing when it comes to How to prepare for a CAT retake is to approach the prep with an attitude towards developing all the skill sets rather than a narrow focus to somehow clear the cut-off. The latter will only make your retake a matter of chance rather than a matter of competence.

Reading Speed & Comprehension

The first thing to grasp is that reading speed is a skill, just as driving a car is or playing a sport is; like them, it is a function of a certain natural predisposition and a lot of time spent practising. While you can learn to drive a car in a short span of time, you will need to put in a lot of miles of driving under various conditions before you can drive at high speeds with a lot of control; the same applies to Reading Comprehension. So there is no other way to master Reading Comprehension than by practising a lot.

What do I mean by a lot of practice? You should finish the entire RC material of at the least one of the test-prep players’ study material. Once you are through with this you should practice the RCs from the GMAT Official Guide (soft copies of which you can find online); this is just practice. Apart from this, you need to dedicate some time every day for general reading that is geared not only towards increasing your reading speed and vocabulary but also your general knowledge required to clear the WAT-PI rounds. What qualifies as general reading and what are the kind of books you should read will be dealt with a follow-up post.

Vocabulary

The width and depth of your vocabulary can be a very good indicator of the width and depth of your knowledge. One of the strengths of good communicators is their ability to find the right words for the situation, in other words, their articulation skills. Very often I have found that despite knowing words, students need not always know the usual context in which the words are used.

Take for instance the word “mediocre”. While the dictionary meaning is average, it is usually used with a negative connotation. I have found many students using the word “mediocre” not with a negative connotation but with a neutral connotation, almost interchangeably with the word “medium”. This more than provides an explanation as to why many students find questions around style, tone, and attitude of the author tough to handle.

The only way to learn words is to read them as part of a text and understand them in context. If someone is writing an editorial about the current government and calls its performance “mediocre”, it means that he/she feels that it is below par or underwhelming. By reading the entire article you will be able to grasp this.

So what do you need to do to develop a good vocabulary? Read extensively and check meanings of unknown words as and when they appear. As mentioned earlier, I will do a separate post on what is the requisite reading that you should be doing. I finished two books during my CAT prep despite having a good vocabulary — Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis and All About Words by Morris Rosenbaum and Maxwell Nurnberg, the second one is at a slightly advanced level than the first. So it goes without saying that doing these books will not hurt you in the least. If you have a poor memory, just keep re-doing the books.

Grammar

Grammar questions are probably the least important in terms of weightage but knowledge of the rules of Grammar is something that will always come in handy when it comes to communication in a professional setting be it spoken or written. The only professionals from the sub-continent who can carry off poor English are cricketers from our neighbouring country! How to prepare for a CAT retake?

So finish the Grammar books from your Study Material and then practice Sentence Correction questions from the GMAT Official Guide. For those of you who are reasonably good with the basic Grammar rules but want to avoid inadvertent errors and improve your written English, Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss will prove to be a humorously useful resource as will The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B.White.

Verbal Reasoning

A lot of your ability on Verbal Reasoning will depend on how much you move from choosing options based on gut-feel to rejecting options based on logic. The best resources will again be the entire material offered as part of the classroom program of established players. In addition, Critical Reasoning questions from the GMAT OG will be a good supplement in terms of the quantum of practice. For those with good VERBAL Ability there is just one suggestion — start reading at a slightly faster speed than you currently do even if it is uncomfortable, it will soon become your normal speed (not very different from working out).

DI & LR — Practice, Practice & more qualitative practice!

Like RC, DI-LR, which along with RC constituted more than half the paper in CAT 2017, is a section/area that tests a skill rather than knowledge and hence demands a lot of practice. What is important though is that you not only solve enough sets but also evaluate the way you solved to weed out unnecessary calculations, double-solving, and false starts.

One of the ways of improving your ability in DI-LR is to solve good quality sets from previous years’ Papers books such as CAT 500. How to prepare for a CAT retake- The thing with DI-LR is that all of us will be reasonably good at solving the standard question types. The problem arises when the level is amped up a bit like it was on CAT 2017. What you need to do is to ensure that you genuinely understand the kind of logic that is tested on tougher sets.

All IMS classroom students will do well just to solve all LR sets from all the class sheets and workshops to get a good idea of the width of DI-LR tested. I am sure that there will be quite a few sets that you would not have been able to crack in class and will find difficult to crack even now (despite having listened to the explanation). The reason for this is that such sets require you to go beyond your default LR settings and you have not yet grasped the difference between such sets and the regular LR sets.