Here is the ugly truth that no one tells you about taking the CAT – in your quest of attempting as many questions as you can, you are actually giving yourself more chances to screw up. The more questions you attempt – the greater the risk of a double negative, a missed opportunity or an unforced error.
Which brings me to the most unpardonable sin you can commit in the CAT – the greed of attempting more and more questions.
To address this, you will have to attain nirvana from this greed of “I will attempt as many questions as possible” or “I will attempt all 30 questions”. And for this I present to you a simple solution: Leaving questions improves your score.
Of course, like everything else in life, this is not as easy as it sounds. You cannot indiscriminately skip questions and hope to improve your score. To make this work for you, we’ll first have to analyze your performance pattern in the last few mocks.
What you’ve been doing till now
The number of attempts for most students averages around 12-15 in each section and the number of correct answers around 8-9. But this means you are not even able to get 90% accuracy even after spending almost 5 minutes per question. There’s your next serious problem – the definition of an attempt.
Most define attempts as the numbers of questions for which an answer was marked. What then are:
• The QA questions in which over 1.5 minutes were spent in forming equations, doing calculations and no answer marked?
• The DI/LR sets in which after unsuccessfully making the table you abandoned set without marking any answer?
• The RC questions whose answer were not marked after reading the passage?
• The Para Completion & Para Jumbles question that were left unmarked after 2-3 minutes of working?
The correct definition of Attempts is the number of questions in which you spent at least 1.5 minutes, whether you marked the answer or not. In each section there would be around 5-6 such questions hence most of the students are attempting around 20 questions with 8-9 answers marked correctly, 5-6 incorrect answers and 5-6 question for which the answers were not marked even after spending time.
Pick up any Mock CAT that you attempted recently and identify the questions that you spent the most time on, you will be surprised to discover that:
• The 8-10 questions that were answered correctly took only around 20 minutes.
• The 5-6 questions that were answered incorrectly also took around 20 minutes and at least half of these were unforced errors (or silly mistakes) that happened because of rushing through the question or the calculation. Spending another 30 sec in understanding the question or in calculation would have converted a -1 to +3
• The remaining 5-6 questions for which no answer was marked even after spending time took around 30 minutes. These were the speed breakers that derailed you. Most probably, if these questions had not been attempted, the unforced errors would have vanished.
But what the remaining 10 odd questions?
What about the remaining 10 odd questions which also include 4-5 sitters that you did not notice in the paper? You did not have time for these questions because you were not willing to leave those 5-6 speed breakers. This means that CAT forces you to leave questions, the difference between an IIM call getter and one who does not is:
IIM call-getter: Exercises choice attempts the easy questions, leaves questions that are difficult to crack and thus would have been a waste of time. Because (s)he picks and chooses questions to leave, he does not miss out on the easy sitters and scores precious marks.
Misses out on IIM call: Attempts whatever comes his/her way and is forced to leaves 10 odd questions anyways – some of these are bound to be easy sitters that lost him precious marks, while critical time was wasted on difficult questions which may or may not have gotten any marks.
Why is it difficult to leave questions?
There are four reasons because of which many of you fight on foolishly to win the battle and in the process loose the war. Here are my top four reasons which stop you from taking the right steps.
When the obstacle becomes a challenge
Most of you have a very good academic record and have been among the toppers in school and college due to which you are in the habit to attempting all questions correctly in exams. So when you come across a difficult question that under time pressure you are unable to solve correctly your EGO takes a big hit and you consider the question as a Challenge that has to be conquered and not an obstacle that has to be side stepped to reach the goal.
The fear of what lies ahead:
For those of us who were not good in academics, when we see a question which we think is solvable we are thankful and start working on it even if we are not sure of solving it is as if we believe that all the subsequent questions will be more difficult than this one.
You’ve gone too far to return
There are some questions that we honestly feel that we can solve but after spending a couple of minutes do not reach anywhere, yet we continue spending time in the hope that investing more time will get us the answer. This misplaced optimism is nothing but throwing good money after bad money.
Flirt with danger; don’t start a relationship with it
Many a times, some of us who are academically inclined fall in love with the question. We start admiring the elegance with which the QA question has been framed, get blinded by the beauty of the logic, we get emotionally involved with the issues raised in the RC passage or the para completion or the para jumble question. We forget that our job is to flirt & move on and not to commit and settle down. Why waste time over an unresponsive person when there are many other fishes in the pond.
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