Past papers
CAT — Reading previous papers properly
In an examination where you cannot attempt everything, the decisions about what to attempt account for a large share of the outcome. Past papers, worked under sectional timing, are where those decisions get trained. A candidate who can solve every reasoning set given unlimited time but chooses the wrong three under forty minutes will score poorly, and only practice fixes that.
A method for past papers
- Always practise under sectional timing. An untimed CAT paper is a different examination and teaches the wrong habits.
- In the reasoning section, log which sets you chose and why. Then review whether the ones you skipped were genuinely harder. This calibrates your selection instinct.
- In verbal, track accuracy by passage type. Most candidates are consistently weaker on one kind of passage, and knowing which lets you triage.
- In quantitative, build a topic frequency table. Arithmetic dominates; confirm it for yourself and let it guide revision.
- Never leave a type-in-the-answer question blank. No deduction applies; a blank is a discarded chance.
What to log when you work a past reasoning section
- Which sets you chose, and in what order — the choice is the skill. Recording it makes the decision visible and therefore reviewable, which it never is if you only record the score.
- How long you took to decide — good candidates spend the first minute or two scanning all the sets before touching any of them. Candidates who start on set one have made no decision at all.
- Whether the sets you skipped were actually harder — reviewing them afterwards without a clock is how selection judgement is calibrated. Sometimes you left the easiest set on the table.
- Where the section went wrong, if it did — almost always one of two things: a set that consumed fifteen minutes without resolving, or a slow start that left too little time for the sets you could have done.
For reading comprehension, track accuracy by passage type rather than in aggregate. Most candidates find a consistent pattern — comfortable with science and business passages, weaker on philosophy or literary criticism, or the reverse — and that pattern is directly actionable in two ways. It tells you what to read more of in preparation, and it tells you which passage to leave last on the day when you cannot attempt all of them.
The quantitative frequency table is worth building once and then trusting. Across a decade of papers, arithmetic, algebra and number systems account for a substantially larger share than geometry and modern mathematics, and within arithmetic a handful of themes dominate. That distribution is stable enough that it should determine the order in which you build the section, particularly for a candidate starting late.
Solve past papers under sectional timing, always
An untimed past paper measures your mathematics; a sectionally timed one measures your CAT. Since the examination is fundamentally a test of decisions made under a closing clock, practice that removes the clock removes the thing being tested — and it tends to produce a comfortable score that misleads you about your readiness.
