SIS- Analysis- Test Strategy

Mock CAT 1 (2004)- An Analysis

An “executive” summary:
Once the initial customary acts of praying to the Gods and meditating were over, you should have read the Instructions on the cover page. There was nothing very exceptional about the instructions, but nevertheless it should be second only to the prayers!

The cover page itself gives you an idea about the following: The paper has 3 sections and 150 questions distributed equally. You can safely allot equal amount of time of 40 minutes to each section. Of course, you can refine your time once you look at the questions inside! A point of caution: don’t think that you have 120 minutes with you! You can take out at least 10-12 minutes for marking the answers and looking around the class for whatever reasons you might have. So it makes sense to allot only 35 minutes to each section.

Now, once you open the seal, you can see that Section-I is EU (26 questions) and RC (24 questions spread across 4 passages and a poem!!!). You curse your luck for having to see a poem (of all things) in your very first tryst with Mock CATs. Section-II is QA with some figures and about 10 Group questions. 4 DS questions complete the picture. Section-III is DI. It has a truckload of all sorts of chart/ graph based questions that look harmless at first glance. There are some analytical questions of the usual kind. Overall, the DI section looks the scariest! And it makes sense to tweak the timings slightly in its favour.

A possible matrix for the attempt pattern is given below:

Sect #	Topic	Time	Total Qs	# of attempts for IIMs	Possible Score for IIMs
1	EU RC	20 min 20 min	26 24	17 13	24
2	QA	40 min	50	24	20
3	DI AR DS	40 min	28 18 4	28	22
	Total	120 min	150	82	66

Notice that the timings have been distributed equally among all sections. You should fine tune your own timings depending on your strengths. For instance, a person weak in DI would certainly gain by taking a couple of minutes off from first 2 sections and giving it to DI.

Section I:

The first six questions required you to match the dictionary meaning of a word with its appropriate usage. Of these six, four were very simple. They were the questions dealing with drain, flash, stifle and design. One could have attempted at least these four.

The next five questions were short cloze type passages with 2 blanks each. They required a good vocabulary. If you have been honing your vocabulary skills, these questions would have been a cake-walk. Otherwise, at least the last question was simple enough for anyone to attempt.

Questions 12 to 16 were of parajumbles of five sentence type. Of these, only question 13 was tricky. The rest were relatively simple and could have easily been attempted.

The next 5 questions were summary based questions. (This type of questions was seen for the first time in CAT 2003.) The language used in the paragraphs given was abstract and tough to comprehend for most. At best you should have attempted two out of five.

Questions 22 to 26 tested you on grammar. Of these, only question 23 was tricky. Even this question could be solved with a little care. But all the other questions were simple enough for anyone who knows the basics of grammar.

Questions 27 to 50 were of reading comprehension. Of these the first 20 were based on prose passages and the last four required you to read verse. In reading comprehension it is extremely important to glance through the passages and the questions before you start attempting anything. The first passage was about author Montana Scalp. The language was philosophical and the tone was abstract. Most of the questions to this passage were inference based. So the best strategy would have been to come back to this passage if you had time. The second passage was about education. It was a factual passage and was not tough to understand. The questions too were fact-based. One could have easily attempted this passage and got most of the answers right. Passage three was about product innovation and was also simple to understand. The first three questions were factual and should have been attempted. The last two were inference based and required you to think. Passage four was about the evolution of scientific paradigms. Though it talked about science, it was philosophical in nature. The first two questions were factual and could be easily attempted. If you understand ‘paradigms’ and ‘paradigm shifts’ you could also attempt the other three questions. The fifth passage was actually a poem. It required some reflection and familiarity with poetry reading and comprehension. However, out of the four questions, the first three were factual and could be attempted. If you understood the poem, you could also attempt the fourth one. In all, from the 24 reading comprehension questions you could attempt at least 12 questions.

Section II:

Lets do a minute-by-minute account of how one could have attempted this section. I assume that the student has not prepared all the topics and definitely wants to clear the cut-offs. The focus is not on scoring “high” although that is always welcome! You might have minor differences in deciding what questions to attempt and what not to attempt, depending on your individual capabilities and comfort level with various topics in Math. This is an overall strategy and just keep reading till you are finished! Also, I am assuming that you are not scared of hard work and will take up questions that are “solvable” even if you know that it involves mean labour!

I am also not delving on the solutions of these problems, since I feel the Answers and the methods explained in the answer sheet are sufficient by themselves.

Q #	Observation	Action	Time	Cum. time	Attempts
51	Not very clear about exponents…doesn’t strike me	Skip	3 sec	0:03	-
52	Too long and complex	Skip	5 sec	0:08	-
53	I know that at least one has to be zero…that is a-b=0, that is a=b and by symmetry, a=b=c! Take some values	Attempt	1 min	1:08	1
54	Don’t know functions…and this one is f(g(x))	Skip	3 sec	1:11	-
55	Seems easy, but logs complicate the matter!	Skip	3 sec	1:14	-
56	Algebra not my cup of tea	Skip	3 sec	1:17	-
57	Looks like Permutations- out-of-syllabus, will do it in the next Mock CAT!	Skip	3 sec	1:20	-
58	Figure makes it pretty clear…anyway, I can eliminate choices wide apart! (6 and 18 are too low as the shadow must be much longer than the triangle!)…and I have done just one problem till now!	Attempt	1 min	2:20	2
59	The choice Data Insufficient may make it easy! Anyway, just need to list down all factors of 300.	Attempt	1 min	3:20	3
60	May take some time, but at least I know for sure that its workable! (Has to be much more than 124 (=23+46+55)	Attempt	1:30 min	4:50	4
61	Probability and calendars (Kareyla Aur Neem Chadha?!)	Skip	3 sec	4:53	-
62	Functions, but I just need to check with some values of x (x=1,-1,2)	Attempt	45 sec	5:38	5
63, 64	TSD and 2 questions. (Aish, Sallu and Vivek involved…hmmm…must be interesting…but don’t fall for such names!)	Skip	10 sec	5:48	-
65	Scary!	Skip	3 sec	5:51
66	Haven’t even reached probability in my syllabus!	Skip	3 sec	5:54
67	Series problem…Eliminate choices (sum of first 4 terms > 3.5)	Attempt	45 sec	6:39	6
68	At least, it doesn’t look like 45°. Worth a try!	Attempt	1 min	7:39	7
69	Worst case, I need to draw all squares on a chess board!	Attempt	1:30 min	9:09	8
70	Yes, I know this one! Just need to know product and sum of roots…	Attempt	1 min	10:09	9
71, 72	Looks pretty straight. Worst case, I need to draw the situations…worth a try! (72 is absolutely dependent on 71 since all choices a,b,c have B in them!…there is a God somewhere…)	Attempt	2:30 min	12:39	11
73	3-D…seems tough	Skip	3 sec	12:42	-
74-76	Worst case, fill up the grid!	Attempt	4 mins	16:42	14
77	No way!	Skip	5 sec	16:47	-
78-80	Who could think of such a thing!!! I am not falling for these	Skip	5 sec	16:52	-
81	Seems easy (Triangle area is half of the rectangle…)	Attempt	1 min	17:52	15
82	Too complex…more like an RC question simplified!	Skip	5 sec	17:57	-
83	Worth a try! (can work with choices)	Attempt	1 min	18:57	16
84	Functions and Trigonometry (KANC again!!!)	Skip	3 sec	19:00	-
85	That should be easy!	Attempt	1 min	20:00	17
86	Not falling for that one!	Skip	3 sec	20:03	-
87	Workable…but I hate to test my basics here…	Skip	10 sec	20:13	-
88	Same again…	Skip	5 sec	20:18	-
89	I am clueless about this one too!	Skip	5 sec	20:23	-
90	Ugh…coordinate geometry! Out-of-syllabus!	Skip	3 sec	20:26	-
91	Workable	Attempt	1 min	21:26	18
92	Just need to check values from choices	Attempt	1 min	22:26	19
93	This has to follow some pattern! Just need to work the first one…	Attempt	1 min	23:26	20
94	Functions again…	Skip	3 sec	23:29	-
95	Can substitute values and check	Attempt	1 min	24:29	21
96	Too complex to visualize!!!	Skip	5 sec	24:34	-
97	Series…just check for first 2 or 3 terms…	Attempt	1 min	25:34	22
98	Easy to check for the 4 values!	Attempt	1 min	26:34	23
99	Logs…forget it!	Skip	3 sec	26:37	-
100	Hardly have any time left and this looks some heavy stuff! Need to get to the next section…	Skip	5 sec	26:42	-
				About 27 mins	23 attempts

There would definitely about 5-10 questions that you don’t want to do in the above 23 attempts mentioned. At the same time, there might be another 3-5 questions that you might like to do because that is your strong area. However, as an overall strategy, the first round of attempts should include ONLY those questions that don’t challenge you! Work on what YOU think are easy and NOT what someone else in the class thought are easy! Remember, your strengths might be weaknesses to another person and vice versa.

You should have ended up doing anywhere between 13 and 20 attempts in about 27 minutes, if you had followed the above advice. Then, you are left with about 10 – 13 minutes to go for the ever elusive second round! Very rarely have I assumed that you will take less than a minute to solve the Round 1 problems. Hence, in the remaining 10 minutes, you could attempt 5 more problems taking 2 minutes per question! With a decent accuracy from 18 –20 attempts in QA, you should land up with about 15+ of QA score. Now look at your score. If you managed to cross this figure comfortably in the given 35-40 minutes, you should consider taking some of your QA time to a weaker section. If you are below this figure, try to look at this chart again and again and customize it yourself. Relive the exam time and see if you had tried to attempt questions that should have been out-of-bounds for you. Use very strong ego-free statements like “I can’t do functions at all” or “This is too tough for me” or “I am not made for this at all” to skip questions. Don’t worry about having to leave too many questions. You can be assured that you won’t fall short of questions! Worst case, you could do only 10 questions in the first round, but that would have taken 10 minutes (to attempt 10 questions) + 120 secs (to skip 40 questions) =12 minutes! So not much time lost!

This is not a rule book that can be a panacea for all your QA worries, but its surely worth a try in your next test.

Section III:

The key to success in a DI section is to select the right sets to work on in the best possible order. Several parameters, many of them being individual specific, influence your order of attempts. A wrong start can demotivate you and waste a lot of time. So investing about 2-3 minutes in getting the order right will benefit you in the long run. Two different approaches work here. First, you can try and select the easiest set to start and do it. Then you look at the next best set and so on. Second, you can rank all of them in order of ease for you. Second one, obviously, will need more time to start with, but it will be a one-time effort! This approach will also have some amount of panic-factor especially if you have not been disciplined enough with your previous sections. Many a time, you will find yourself left with hardly any time for DI, if you have not been strict with your time-keeping and if this happens to be your last section!

Lets follow the first approach, simply because it is easier to go with and you waste less time in looking up the entire sets. It might make sense to go for the second approach in some future Mock CATs. You can also try it yourself with this Mock CAT and see if this works better for you.

Looking at the complete section, I would be most comfortable with the sets that are conventional pie and bar graphs than the logical and analytical sets to begin with. These kind of sets may be difficult to calculate but rarely difficult to understand! And I am sure you would agree with me that it feels good to get your first few questions completed, albeit with a little more time, rather than the risk of not being able to do a set at all.

Hence your best bet could be any of the sets III (108-110), IX (131-134), X (135-137), XIII (146-148) or XIV (149-150). Of these, the last two are particularly attractive. The X set seems to the ideal starter since it has convenient numbers, easy bar graphs and easy questions. Next in line might be the last set although it has only 2 questions! Set IX would be next as again there are easy numbers and easy to comprehend questions. Set III is not high on my list because of multiple pie charts and large numbers, even though you will realize that the questions are easy. But sadly, you would come to know about the ease of questions only AFTER you attempt them. On an average, you would have taken about 11-14 minutes to solve these 9 questions. If you have been careful, you would have achieved 100% accuracy in these questions. Do set XIII if you understand the data first time. Otherwise, you should move to other types of sets.

When you look at other sets, you need to look at the complexity of the data presented. Of course, most of them don’t need any calculations. The sets I, IV, XI and XII are the ones that need some kind of reorganization of given data in a tabular format. You could do XII (just needs some idea about numbers), I (less data to organize), IV (questions can be done individually too) and XI (unarguably, the most complex, but not impossible! definitely a set to be done with a cup of your evening tea) in that order.

Sets II, V, VII with the single question 117 are the “thinking” types. Among these, you could start with set V and question 117 before moving on to set II, if you are comfortable with algorithms. Set VII is again could be a great set to attempt in Mock CAT, but might as well prove to be your waterloo for being deceptive to the core.

If you notice, I didn’t mention set VI anywhere in the discussion. I am sure some of you would find this kind of data representation a little “strange” and difficult to understand. However, if you force yourself to become “friendly” with such a representation, you will find these questions to be great starters! So, go ahead and get familiar with unconventional kinds of data representations. A great way to do this is to go through umpteen kinds of graphs in the good old Excel worksheets.
Last, but not the least, the five DS questions test your fundamentals. Venture into these ultimate tests of your capability with a calm mind. Don’t take chances if you are not completely sure about your answers. A good benchmark could be to attempt about 40-60% of these questions with full confidence. If you don’t believe me, try to analyze all your DS attempts till date and check for yourself.

All the Best for the next Mock CAT!!!

Strategies