The Hindu Business Line : Revision of concepts is the key

The Common Admission Test (CAT) 2006 is just over 20 weeks away and for many aspirants to the prestigious IIMs and other top B-schools, this is the most critical stage of their preparation. At this stage, it is very important to understand some of the basics of preparing for the CAT. This article emphasises the importance of the most important, yet most often ignored part of CAT preparation — Revision.

Unlike commonly perceived, the CAT is not a test of raw intelligence, but of decision-making ability as well as analytical and problem solving skills. The structure of the paper is such that almost no one will be able to complete it in two hours. While there may be a number of questions which one might find difficult to answer, there would also be enough questions that a well-prepared student will be able to handle. Preparation for such a test would consist of three critical elements — strengthening fundamentals, building the requisite skills and getting maximum possible exposure to the exam situation through practice tests.

In the CAT, some questions are always going to be difficult and impossible to solve in the duration of the test. The problem is that these difficult questions can be in any concept area. For instance, in CAT 2005, the verbal ability (VA) section was much tougher than usual and many candidates were forced to omit a number of VA questions, reducing their score to levels much lower than in previous papers. The only solution to this is to be well prepared in all the test areas.

Preparedness for the CAT consists of two components — knowledge of concepts in all topics in each test area and a high level of familiarity with questions at the CAT level as well as techniques and tricks of solving. Knowledge of concepts improves by tackling a wide variety of problems in every concept area. Study materials provided by reputed training institutes and some books available in bookstores provide such problems for practice.

What study material cannot provide is familiarity. It is very important to note that when it comes to CAT preparation, familiarity with concepts is more important than mere knowledge or understanding. Familiarity is what helps a student quickly understand a problem and figure out the best possible method to solve it. For a student preparing for the CAT, familiarity breeds not contempt, but success.

Familiarity requires many rounds of reworking problems already solved to remind oneself of the nuances in every area and of the tricks and techniques that can improve speed. Reworking a problem, especially a difficult one, will help you place some important concepts top of mind, thus improving your ability to recall them when needed in a test. During your reworking, you may often realise some nuances that turn a problem you found difficult into an easy one. While you revisit problems, you often find patterns by relating to questions you have solved at different points in time in different papers. It is these patterns that will help you evolve shortcuts for solving problems quickly.

Familiarity-building is also the easiest part of preparation. It requires only systematic planning from your side. Once you are sure that you have a good volume of high quality study material, all you need is a good plan to go through it and revise it thoroughly enough. The question that you may have is, `How much revision should I do?' In general, the advice to students is to revise their study material at least five times before the CAT. Clearly, such elaborate revision needs a well chalked out plan.

There are two ways of planning your revision — CAT-date-based, backward planning and test-to-test planning. In the former, you will need to set target dates for each of the five rounds of revision keeping in mind the CAT date. For instance, since CAT 2006 is expected to be held on November 19, you will need to start your last round of revision at least by November 1. Correspondingly, you may need to fix dates for the previous rounds of revision all the way back to where you stand today. This will give you a clear, time-bound action plan.

Test-to-test planning takes into account that you are planning a large number of mock tests, probably every week, as part of your preparation. While the basic objective of these tests is to check out where you stand with respect to the competition, they also serve an important purpose — continuously identifying your weaknesses.

In test-to-test planning, you do a detailed post-test analysis of your performance through an immediate and comprehensive reworking of each test paper. This will throw up weaknesses that affected your performance adversely. These weaknesses could be in concept knowledge or familiarity. You then go through various parts of your material to address these weaknesses. For instance, if you find that you have not done well in geometry, go through the basic study material on geometry and rework all geometry problems in that material, as well as in all the previous tests and exercises you had written. The target date for this revision should be the next mock-test you write. Once you write the next mock-test, you sit down to analyse your performance and restart the entire process.

Ideally, your revision plan should be a healthy mix of the two approaches. What you probably need to do is some sorting out of your priorities and ensure that you give enough time for such a comprehensive revision. If you are a college student, you will need to make plans keeping in mind your regular academic calendar. If you are a working executive, you will need to make a robust plan that will survive the unpredictable demands that the work place places on your time. Five months is sufficient time to make and implement these robust plans. Start today and get cracking.

(The writer, an alumnus of IIT- Madras, and IIM-A, 1998 batch, is Director, Chennai Centre, T.I.M.E., an education and student training/counselling organisation.)

(Starting today The New Manager features a fortnightly series written by IIM-A alumni on cracking the CAT for MBA aspirants.)