Past papers
NMAT — Reading previous papers properly
Because the questions are individually gentler than CAT’s, the limiting factor for most NMAT candidates is not capability but throughput. Practice should therefore focus on reducing the time taken per question rather than on tackling harder material — which is a different objective from CAT preparation and calls for different practice.
How to practise
- Time each section separately at its real limit. The sections are individually timed and cannot subsidise one another.
- Attempt every question, always. Build the no-blanks habit deliberately so it is automatic.
- Drill vocabulary and grammar. The language section is more rule-based than CAT’s, so this genuinely pays here.
- Practise data sufficiency specifically. It appears in NMAT and not in CAT, and it has its own technique.
- Rehearse your chosen section order. So the choice on the day is a plan rather than an improvisation.
What to drill, in order of return
- Calculation speed — fractions, percentages, ratios, squares and tables, done without writing intermediate steps. The quantitative section is largest and its questions are routine, so throughput there moves the score most.
- Vocabulary — synonyms, antonyms and usage, tested directly here in a way CAT no longer tests them. A running list of ten items a day compounds well over three months.
- Grammar rules — error identification and sentence completion rest on a finite rule set — agreement, tense, prepositions, modifiers, parallelism — that can genuinely be finished.
- Data sufficiency — a distinct technique: evaluate each statement alone, then together, and stop as soon as sufficiency is established. Candidates who solve the question fully are doing unnecessary work under a tight clock.
Practise every section at its real time limit from the beginning rather than working untimed and adding the clock later. Because the questions are individually approachable, untimed practice produces high accuracy and a misleading sense of readiness — the score looks excellent and tells you nothing about whether you would have reached those questions in the time allowed. The clock is the examination.
Rehearse your chosen section order in practice papers, not just in your head. Order effects are real: candidates frequently find that taking the quantitative section first leaves them rushed in language, or that opening with reasoning costs them the freshness the quantitative section needed. Two or three papers in each candidate order will settle the question with evidence rather than intuition.
Never leave a blank, even in practice
With no penalty, an unanswered question is a discarded mark and there is no argument for it. The reason to enforce this in practice as well as in the examination is that behaviour under time pressure defaults to habit — and a candidate who has left blanks in twenty practice papers will leave them in the twenty-first, whatever they intended.
