It is widely considered that to achieve a 90% plus score in CAT, one must be able to attempt around 70 to 80 percent of the question paper. But attempting alone won’t solve the problem, your accuracy needs to be high while doing so, scoring, and avoiding any negative marking. While accuracy can’t be developed in some time and the thorough practice for weeks and months is needed to achieve it, some common tips to do so exist. Following are some of them:
Quantitative Section
- You might face many questions that seem tempting, and you can answer them easily, but end up consuming a lot of time, eating up the time that could have been used to solve other multiple questions. It is better to skip these and return to them only when you have given your best attempt on the others.
- Try to prepare well in advance by memorizing squares and cubes up to 30 and 25 respectively, that makes your calculation faster and accurate, so you don’t have to cross check many a times using pen and paper.
- Try to practice various levels of questions after getting the concept and formula to test if you can maneuver through tricky framing of the questions easily or not.
Reasoning and DI Section
- Make a note of all the important points of the question to eliminate the most absurd options available right away and then spend time to confirm the close calls.
- Just like the quantitative section, be good with your squares and cube knowledge which might come in handy along with percentage in the DI section.
- Avoid wasting time by spending too much of it on tempting questions that slow you down.
Verbal Section
- Read the paragraph firs before having a look at the questions to understand the core message and avoid any pre-conceived notion about what is being asked in the passage.
- Many a times, the initial paragraph of the passage is good enough to give you an idea if it is a simple one or a complex one, and then you can make decision to whether skip it for the time being and look at other questions. Do assign priorities to passages which have more questions related to them as a little effort in reading and understanding those can increase your score.
- Make a note of important or repetitive themes in the passage as they might help you summarize the core message better and help you eliminate the options quickly.