How to analyze your first Mock CAT| Important Do’s and Don’ts

How to analyze your first Mock CAT| Important Do’s and Don’ts

Hopefully, by now all of you have written your first mock test. For some of you the result has turned out to be pretty well and for quite a few students the results weren’t as you guys expected. In such a situation many are afraid to write their second mock test and many are thinking about what inference they should draw from the scores of their first-ever mock test. Everyone tells you that the value in taking Mock CATs lies in analyzing them, and not just in mechanically taking them. How exactly does one review Mock CATs? You might also want to check out our highly informative A-Z Guide for Mock CATs with answers to relevant questions. In this article, we will try to delve deeper into some of the bigger ideas and inferences each and every CAT aspirant should start to obviate further trouble. Let’s dive in!

Do’s

1) Choosing the right question

Question Selection becomes very important on a test where you do not need to answer a question before you move ahead and you can navigate to and fro between questions. After taking your first mock test,your first task should be to identify and solve the easiest questions or sets first, mark the medium-level questions later and never attempt the really tough questions.

You should ask yourself the following questions

• Did you have unread questions at the end of each section?
• How many errors are from guesses, how many from ‘silly errors’, and how many from being caught out by the question? More importantly, how many errors were due to fatigue?
• How many questions that have been ‘skipped’ were doable?
• Did find that you ended up wasting time on tough DI or LR sets only to find out too late or after the test that there were easier questions or sets?

If your answer to any of these questions is YES, it means that this first mock CAT is simply an eye-opener for you with respect to your test-taking strategy.

2) Time management

The CAT has always been doing flip-flops on the question of where it stands with respect to time allocation. When you have to divide your time properly, choose the right questions and solve them correctly, you have to play three roles of CEO, Manager, and Worker respectively. With sectional time limits, you end up playing only the latter two roles — Manager and Worker. Most of you by now would have realized that for the better part of your first mock test you were doing only one role — Worker.

3) What are the things in your first mock where you could have done better?

While analyzing your first mock test you should look at the questions you solved correctly and see if you could have done them faster

• could you have cut down on solving that DI or LR set if you had spent more time, in the beginning, trying to understand the set?
• could you have solved some questions/problems faster by not writing so much, by approximating or looking for an alternate approach?

Use this to make a  list of the process improvements you can make in the next mock CAT.

4) Solve all the unsolved questions in the first mock CAT

Use every unsolved question to learn concepts from topics you have not yet covered. So if there is a problem from right angle triangle then you can at least learn the concept for the right angle triangle by learning to solve that problem. People keep asking for tough problems, especially tough DI and LR sets. The mock CATs will always have the best sets. So spend enough time trying to solve them on your own before looking at the solutions. If you consistently do these things over the next few months after each and every mock CAT, you will definitely start seeing results.

Don’ts

1)Do not waste your time by looking at the scores of the toppers!

I am sure you would have seen that the scores and percentiles of toppers will be in a different range and obviously that will set you wondering if they are from a different planet. Well, most of them will be test-takers who gave a serious shot last year but could not make it for some reason. Always remember that many greats have made modest starts. NovaK Djokovic took 5 years to win his first major. So just believe in yourself. And forget the rest, and give your best!

2) Do not take the percentile scores too seriously!

The percentile you got in the first mock CAT of a particular mock test series counts for pish tosh. So, chuck that. Your first mock is similar to jumping off a diving board for the first time. Just like you would not bother too much about the score given to your first ever dive, do not think too much about the score you got. This is not the report of your covid antibody test. The percentile is one of the most misleading statistic around. Very often students get into a false comfort zone if the percentiles are going in the right direction. There is no single mock test provider in the country who has managed to mimic CAT well. So, if you are doing better and better at Test Series A, chances are that you have cracked that series well. Go and try a few in Series B and C. The number of students who consistently score 99th percentile in a test series and find themselves in no man’s land when the actual CAT comes along is very high.

Cracking the CAT is a skill and it will take time to develop. Think of the first mock CAT as the first time you took a car out after learning how to drive a car in the driving school — one will be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and the pressure of driving in real-time traffic. But by repeatedly taking out the car all by oneself, one learns, one will bang the car, make a dent in it, but one will get better for sure. All you have to do is take as many mock CATs as possible, spend enough time analyzing the tests you take, and stay patient, the results will show.

Abhishek Mukherjee works at 2IIM, and is a keen writer.