What should you look for in Online CAT Coaching?7 min read

What should you look for in Online CAT Coaching?

In the last blog, we saw the difference between Online CAT Coaching and Classroom CAT Coaching to help you choose one. If you haven’t read it, check it out here.

Now that you have chosen to go for Online CAT Coaching, there is this confusion about how to choose the right Online CAT Coaching from the plethora of options available. What are the things to keep in mind while evaluating CAT Online Coaching Course and so on? I will be addressing all of these questions to help you get clarity on choosing the right one. So, sit tight and get ready!

I am going to break this into three parts.

• What should you look for in coaching?
• What you should look for in Online CAT Coaching 
• What should you look for in an Online CAT Course?

What are Coaching Classes about?

Hark back to your childhood learning experiences, think about what you recall about the learning part. I bet it will be some Gupta Sir or Rani Ma’am. I remember Professor Udayamurthy, Prof Muralitharan and Professor Balu – all for different reasons. Coaching classes are about results, infrastructure, study material, location, and 100 other things. But most importantly, over and beyond this, they are about the teachers. The whole thing boils down to “Who teaches and how they teach?”

There are three F’s to this decision making – Funda, Flair and Fit

Does the teacher have strong fundas? Does she know her stuff inside out?

Does she have teaching flair? Can she make the learning experience fun? Remember, classes do not have to be rip-roaring fun filled with laughter. Oftentimes that is counter-productive. But they should be engaging.

Does the teaching style fit me? Do I get the teacher? When I was younger, I have sat through classes of famous teachers and they did nothing for me. They broke ideas into chunks and drilled them in.

I wanted ideas to be arrived at with a certain intuition. But I did not have the vocabulary or the courage to articulate this and so sat through hours of classes that did not work for me. You guys are brave and clear thinkers. You should think about whether the style of the teacher works for you.

What to look for in an Online CAT Coaching class?

The comfort offered by online course is straight-forward – you can learn anywhere, any time and any number of times. But the primary focus is still the teacher. Attending CAT Online Coaching courses where there are lots of classes taken by several teachers with different schedules can be gruelling and confusing. An ideal Online CAT Course should offer classes delivered by a small team of high-quality teachers.

Beyond this come the technical aspects. The user-interface should be intuitive, the audio and video should be clear, and the classes should be interactive. The audience-retention challenge is insanely tough in an online class. We all need to accept that when you are in an online class, it is but one tab in one window of one electronic device that you happen to have on at that moment.

We are living in an era of thousand notifications. Something clamours for our attention all the time. So, for an online course to be meaningful, the class should be engaging. There should be no slack in the course. If the teacher takes a 10-minute detour to pitch a course, people drop off, if there is an inordinate amount of time spent on a simple question, people open another tab. The class should be tight, intense, and engaging.

Now there is a myth that fun classes are ones where the teacher regales the audience with jokes and anecdotes. This is not true. A passionate teacher who is fully immersed in teaching his topic automatically translates that enthusiasm to students. A class can be super fun with zero jokes and detours.

Buy an Online CAT Coaching Course that you can experience prior to purchase.

Because the user engagement is crucial, it is important to try out any course before you buy(2IIM gives 40 hours of content for free trial). Do not extrapolate the value of a course based on one YouTube talk you have heard from the founder. The skillset required for impressing an audience in a 30-minute talk and teaching a class on inequalities for 90 minutes are miles apart. Any provider who does not let you evaluate the course before purchase is not confident enough about his game. Ignore him and move on to the others.

What to look for in an Online CAT Coaching Course?

This part is more straightforward. You look for the following.

1. The course needs to be comprehensive – it should offer Quant, LRDI and VARC in sufficient depth.
2. It should offer Live Online and a product backbone(self-paced). Live classes add flavour and zip to the course. But 75% of the consumption happens via recorded lectures. The backbone of recorded lectures should be excellent.
3. The course should be modularized and well-structured. If I want to learn about discounts in Profit & Loss, I should be able to zoom in on that in 90 seconds. And not have to go through a 3-hour video on Profit and Loss where I spend half my time moving up and down the video.
4. The provider should have a track record in teaching online. Every provider under-estimate how difficult it is to build an online course. We at 2IIM build an online course that has 10,000 videos; all shot by one person. It has taken us 9 years and counting to build this. And we have binned probably another 10,000 videos during this process.
5. They should offer adequate practice tests and mocks.
6. They should provide mentorship support to help navigate this preparation journey.

You can use the above pointers as a checklist and evaluate different online courses to find the best fit for you. I hope this will help you in deciding the right Online CAT Coaching. Stay tuned for the next blog, where we’ll see the difference between 2 variants of CAT Online Courses – Live Online and Self-Paced.

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