Strategy
CAT — How to prepare
The most common misconception about CAT preparation is that it is about learning things. Very little of what CAT asks is unknown to a graduate — the mathematics is school-level and the English is ordinary. What has to be built is speed of comprehension, fluency with routine calculation, and the judgement to choose well under pressure. All three accumulate slowly and none responds to cramming.
A six to nine month plan
- From day one — read difficult material daily. Long-form journalism, essays, and writing on subjects you do not naturally follow. Reading comprehension speed is built by reading, not by practising questions.
- Months one to three — arithmetic to fluency. Percentage, ratio, averages, time and work, time and distance. Arithmetic carries the quantitative section and underpins data interpretation too.
- Months one to four — reasoning sets, daily. Two or three a day. This section improves through volume more than any other.
- Months three to six — algebra, geometry and number systems. The remainder of the quantitative syllabus, built on the arithmetic foundation.
- From month three — one sectionally timed mock a week. With analysis time exceeding attempt time.
- From month five — two mocks a week, still fully analysed. And deliberate work on whichever section is weakest.
- Final two months — no new content. Selection practice, accuracy work and consolidation only.
The characteristic errors
- Practising untimed — CAT is a test of decisions under time pressure; untimed practice trains none of that.
- Taking mocks without analysing them — the analysis is the preparation; the mock is only the raw material.
- Ignoring the weakest section — sectional cutoffs mean it constrains your calls regardless of your overall percentile.
- Trying to attempt everything — the paper is designed so that you cannot. Selection is the skill.
- Leaving type-in-the-answer questions blank — they carry no penalty and should always be attempted.
- Reading — the longest lead time in the preparation
- Comprehension speed and comfort with unfamiliar argument cannot be built in a final month. A candidate who reads difficult, unfamiliar prose daily for six months arrives with an advantage that no amount of late verbal practice replicates, and one who does not cannot manufacture it.
- Arithmetic fluency — the highest-leverage content work
- Percentages, ratios, fractions and their equivalents, done fast and without writing much down. It underpins the quantitative section and most of data interpretation, and it is the one genuinely content-shaped investment that pays across two of the three sections.
- Selection judgement — the skill the test is built around
- Trained only by sectionally timed practice followed by honest review of what you chose. It is the difference between candidates with similar knowledge and very different percentiles, and it is almost entirely absent from untimed preparation.
Give the weakest section more time than feels natural, for a structural reason rather than a motivational one. Percentile is a rank, and ranks move fastest where you are furthest from the crowd — improving a poor section from the fortieth percentile to the seventieth moves your overall position considerably more than improving a strong section from the ninetieth to the ninety-fifth. Sectional cutoffs then compound the effect, because a weak section can cost calls outright.
The final two months are for practice, not content
New topics started in the last eight weeks rarely reach the fluency at which they produce marks, and the time they consume comes out of mock analysis, which reliably would have. By that stage the productive activities are mocks, their analysis, revision of your own error log, and maintaining the reading habit — and nothing else.
