On the day before CAT Aditya Meshram told me that Sidscope and I were going to the home ground while others were playing away matches. What he meant was both of us were going to give CAT at the all too familiar place – King George School. I have given so many exams at that place, right from Agrawals to IMS SimCATs… that it kind of feels, he was right.
So when I reached the school, it felt like home coming. Actually, I had not come to the place since I gave my SimCAT last year. Sidscope came after me and we met the ground. Next stop was the classroom. I was sitting on the second bench, first row. I got the answer paper first. 15 Minutes to go for CAT and we were given the sealed question paper. When I took the paper in my hand, I told myself – whatever happens, don’t panic. I read the instructions. My initial plan was going to be 30-30-30-20-20-20. But then, it turned out to be 25-25-40 paper. I thought that it must be VA with 40 question. Instead of thinking about it as being a disadvantage to me, I decided to immediately concentrate on my strategy. With the skewed distribution, I had to have a skewed distribution of time. I decided that I will first attempt the 3 sections for 30-30-30 min. Then the remaining time 15-30-15. I knew this might change, but I was sure that I will give more time for VA. At this juncture, I kept reminding myself of one of the characters from Naruto- Shikamaru. This guy doesn’t have too many “justu”s but works on strategy to beat his opponents ( and is the kind of half pessimist like me ;))
The bell rang, I started the paper. Looked at all pages. It was indeed 40 Qs VA paper. Smart from IIMs, don’t think any of the classes thought IIMs would do this, even though they might claim they knew it later. I also guessed that it would be an easier section, given that the overall number questions had increased. So, I had to maximize my attempt in VA or else the VA “masters” would eat me up. I went through math section. It seemed usual. I identified around 10 questions to be of “known” type. The first some got stuck up for 4 minutes. Just told myself, this wont work. I have to preempt myself from committing to a math problem. 3 min max. If you cant solve in that, leave it then. I think I attempted around 10 questions in that half an hour. I got the confidence needed to enter VA.
VA was broken into 2 subsections, one with 20 Qs with vocabs and grammar, the other half with RCs. I told myself to take out the vocabs and grammar questions first in the 30 min. And then take care of the RCs in the final assault. Vocabs and grammar questions were of average difficulty. I attempted around 12-13 of them. Meanwhile, I had to take an extra 5 minutes for this section as I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any easy questions from VA. 65 minutes down, next stop was DI.
I started off with DI very well. I attempted the logical puzzles type of questions first. There were 3 such sets with total 10 questions, which was a decent start. Unfortunately, this start was impeded by the ‘stock market’ problem in DI. It was the only 5 question set. So, I wanted to attempt this set and cover my DI section. But, I thought it was really tough. 5 minutes into the set, reading the sum, and 3 questions, I felt I had no idea how to tackle it. I quit the set and moved to a set with calculations. Thanks to the speed calculation book given to me by Nik (Thanks man that material which you gave me really helped), I wasn’t nervous about attempting the set. Usually, I hate such calculation intensive sums. But this time was different. I think I attempted around 3 problems from this. It wasn’t an easy one either. Worse part was that I made a mistake while doing one sum and had to redo the sum when I realized my mistake. It took 10 min and I had already used up my quota for DI. 40 min were over for DI. It was time to shift to VA.
I felt I had not attempted enough sums in DI, so instead of moving to VA, I decided to give 5 more min to DI. That would be 12:20. Then move to math for 10 min as I thought my math attempt was decent and confident. Then finally, 30 minutes for the 4 RCs. I attempted 2 more questions from DI in those 5 min and 4 questions from Quant in the 10 min allotted to it.
It was 12:30 and I fairly happy with my efforts, I just wanted to make sure that I don’t mess up with RCs. Fortunately, even RCs were simpler than usual. I gave 10 min each for 3 RCs attempting around 11-12 more questions. When the final bell rang. I felt really happy. I might get a call or might not get call, but I was satisfied with my efforts.
Getting the call is all relative, it will also depend on the 2.5 lakh other student who gave the exam. I can just wait for the results to come up and then and only then can I know, how well I did in this year’s CAT. Its been long time I had that “Yes, I did it!!!!” moment in my life. Hope it happens in Jan’ 09.
Comments