The Best Way to Remember Quant Formulae Effectively

This one needs no context. The question is timeless, “I keep forgetting Quant Formulae, how do I overcome this?” There are multiple ways to remember Quant Formulae effectively but which one is the most optimum solution? Read on to find out!

The Best Way To Remember Quant Formulae

The most obvious answer seems to be solving tons of questions and plugging the formulae over and over again until it sort of sticks around in your head. This might work for you but it never seemed to do the trick for me.

There’s this classic formula within Speed, Time and Distance which says, “If you’ve travelled the same amount of distance with speeds ‘a’ km/hr and ‘b’ km/hr respectively, then the average speed for the entire journey = 2ab/a+b km/hr“.

Every time I used this formula, it always felt like it had suddenly spring into existence out of nothing! For the life of me I couldn’t remember this! That always made the understanding and remembering bit much tougher. I just couldn’t do it.

This is where derivation came into play. I assumed and assigned values for distance and calculated the values for time and derived the formula from scratch. That’s all there is to it. It really is that simple.

The best way to remember Quant Formulae is to derive them!

Too often we do not pause to do this. Try it out for yourself, and you’ll be amazed as to how well it sticks in your mind. We strongly believe that learning fundamentals is everything when it comes to CAT Preparation.

All those fancy shortcuts and formulae have been derived from purely theoretical foundations. Wrap your head around this, derive the formulae yourself or search for the derivation online, and there you have it.

You might want to check out this highly informative article about common traps to avoid in the quant section during CAT.

What else can you do?

There is something to be said for iterations and plugging in the formulae time and again, like we said. What else can you do to optimize your memory? Now this one is old-fashioned but effective nonetheless.

Write down all formulae within respective topics and have it ready for reference.

Write them down in a book, practice notebook or stick a chart on your wall full of formulae. Whatever helps you remember and refer easily. The goal is to keep looking at it so that you internalize it.

Now, be warned that this is only short-term, but hey, there’s fewer than 90 days to go, so a short-term solution is definitely warranted. Speaking of which, we highly recommend you check out this article about 4 common mistakes to avoid with around 90 days to go for CAT 2020.

Having said that, we still maintain that –

The best solution, hands-down, is to derive the formulae and understand the fundamentals behind it.

You might also want to check out the video below about the topics to pick and select in Quants, if your preparation is slightly askew.

Stay Safe, don’t forget to register and Best Wishes for CAT 2020!

Rajesh Balasubramanian takes the CAT every year and is a 4-time CAT 100 percentiler. He likes few things more than teaching Math and insists to this day that he is a better teacher than exam-taker.