Notes
CAT — Study material for this exam
Work the arithmetic notes hardest and earliest. Percentage and ratio fluency is the foundation of both the quantitative section and much of data interpretation, and a candidate who can convert fractions to percentages instantly reads a data set in a fraction of the time someone computing longhand takes. That single capability is worth more than most topic knowledge.
A daily routine that builds a CAT score
- One long, difficult reading passage — from a source you would not naturally choose.
- Two or three reasoning sets, timed.
- Twenty quantitative questions, mixed rather than by topic.
- Fifteen minutes of pure calculation drilling — fractions, percentages, squares.
- One weekly mock, analysed for longer than it took to attempt.
- Arithmetic — first, and worked to automaticity
- Not because it is the largest topic on paper but because it underpins both the quantitative section and data interpretation. Fluency here means computing a percentage change or a ratio split without writing intermediate steps, which is a different achievement from knowing how.
- Reading material — chosen for discomfort
- The passages CAT sets are drawn from registers most candidates do not read voluntarily: philosophy, literary criticism, economic history, cultural theory. Reading only what you enjoy builds speed in a register the paper may not test. Deliberately read what you would not choose.
- Reasoning sets — variety over volume
- Twenty sets from twenty different sources teaches more than a hundred from one, because what transfers is the process for handling unfamiliarity rather than familiarity with any particular set type.
- Your own mock analysis — the material that matters most
- By the final months, the document you should be revising is the log of what you got wrong and why. It is specific to you and it names the decisions that are actually costing you percentile points.
A caution about accumulating material, which afflicts CAT preparation more than most. Because there is no official syllabus, there is no natural stopping point, and the market supplies an endless quantity of books, question banks and courses. The candidate who works through one good quantitative source twice and reads daily for six months will beat the candidate who owns five sources and has finished none of them — and the second candidate will have worked considerably harder.
Mixed practice, not topic-wise practice
Once you have built a topic, practise it mixed in with everything else rather than in dedicated blocks. Topic-wise practice tells you the method before you start, which removes the recognition step — and recognition under time pressure is precisely what the quantitative section tests. Mixed sets of twenty questions are the closest daily approximation to the real thing.
Reading for a paper decided by selection as much as by ability.| Section | Read this | Do not spend time on |
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| VARC | Long, dense, argumentative prose read daily — philosophy, economics, science writing — plus para summary and jumble technique. | Grammar drilling. This section is reading and reasoning about text, not rules. |
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| DILR | Sets in variety rather than in volume of one type, with selection practised explicitly: rank the sets before solving any of them. | Solving every set in the order printed, which trains the wrong skill. |
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| Quantitative ability | Arithmetic secured first — it carries more than candidates expect — then algebra, geometry and number properties. | Advanced mathematics. The syllabus is school-level; the difficulty is in the application. |
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| Approximation and estimation | Practised deliberately, because most questions ask which is larger or roughly how much. | Exact computation as a habit. |
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| The current pattern | Section structure, sectional timing and marking from the official announcement, which has changed across cycles. | Assuming a previous year’s structure. |
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