CAT 2016 - Preparation Strategy for Verbal Ability

In a nutshell, you say the ultimate essence to success in entrance exams like Common Admission Test (CAT) is practice. Identify your strengths and weaknesses, monitor your performance and then choose your questions wisely. Always remember that great strategy is not only about opening the right doors, but also closing the wrong ones. At the beginning, with so many similar options, you tend to never know what could be the right answer, but practice makes it perfect.

Step 1: Identify your sweet spot

Strategy for CAT in general was to do a run through the entire exam, mark easy and medium questions and attempt them first. You have to realize that all questions carry equal weight, but some are easier. The first step of strategy towards preparation is to identify what you can do best.

Step 2: Identify your weak spot

Over the mocks, spend two-three months, and regularly note down how you are doing on each test, broken down to topic level. Take the mock tests as many as you can, and do it yourself. Once tested, note down your performance and gradually see the patterns arising in which you are good, bad and literally sucked at. This will be your second step, identifying which you are bad and what you sucked at. You can keep Para jumbles at the end of the spectrum.

Step 3: Improve and analyze both strengths and weaknesses

In the third step, you have to work on improving each of these three buckets and your dynamic excel sheet can show you where you are heading. If you devote your practice time in the reverse order of your strength in the topics, your performance will improve considerably, and data never lies. Always monitor your performance. On a granular topic basis, for improving in reading comprehension, the best solution is to read and read as diverse as you can. Reading a lot increases your focus while reading any text and thus pushes up your accuracy. You tend to be alert in the passage around the part of the question automatically.  For vocabulary, learn words, read the dictionary. Word power made easy is a great place to start, and general reading always helps. For para jumbles, they generally tend to have lift offs and ends, that you can pick up.

Step 4: Leave what you will do wrong

Identify what you will always do wrong. Most people think that you should attempt the entire paper. Don't, especially in verbal. Negatives will kill you. Do only when you are sure enough about the right answer.

For the verbal section for CAT, reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary and verbal logic all are important. Focus on these broad areas and build your verbal ability in CAT judiciously.

If you are wondering how to prepare verbal ability in CAT, here is a tiny list to get you started on Verbal reasoning for CAT.

A. Reading
B. Grammar
C. Vocab

1.     Reading reading reading
Started my day everyday with newspaper reading reading and more reading everyday. you will make a habit of reading within a month. Start with anything thats in English Bollywood news, sports, novels anything u are interested in.

2.     Grammar
Grammar questions are still tricky for me and have a poor accuracy in that. Grammar is normally confused with sentence correction questions. But grammar is a must do as reading comprehension, paragraph based questions are all based on grammar. I started with wren and Martin but frankly couldn’t make anything out of it. So I moved to my coaching classes grammar book and moved to SC grail by aristotle. Its the bible for Sentence correction.

3.      Vocab
Here comes the donkey work.. I started with the flashcards and wordlists without much success but quickly moved to word power made easy for learning vocab based on roots and nemonics ie learning words though association of them with other words. I will be be posting few examples of grammar as I get time.

Level II advance
let’s move to advance stage now.
Once you have a sound base it’s good but not enough to crack the exams as basic is not what’s tested in the exams. Second phase is now more about practice. And I did three things:

A. Reading Comprehension
B. ParaJumbles Completion
C. Fill in the blanks
D. Sentence correction

Reading Comprehension
Again back to reading reading reading..
One you are done with the basics ie habit of reading move to going through RC passages everyday instead of relying on newspaper. I used to solve daily 2 passages during my travel time to office or at office hours. I practiced upto the level that I could predict what kind of questions should be asked from this passage. It will take around 1 month time to reach that level. Read RC like a mechanical structure of paragraphs rather than getting emotionally involved in the words.

ParaJumbles and completion
We have 10 formulas within a chapter in Maths, similarly parajumbles can be divided into 8 to 10 type of questions which are coming in exams. I solved around 100 questions from each section from basic to advance level to gain confidence and get ready with my list of “type of questions”

Vocab usage and Fill in the blanks
Once u have mastered vocab you don’t need to worry about fill in the blanks just practice around 50 questions and you are ready to face the exam questions. Solve both fill in the blanks and Vocab usage questions.

Sentence correction
Doing grammar and sentence correction again from your coaching classes notes are enough to crack it. There are only few types of commonly repeated questions which you need to practice.
1. Nouns and pronouns
2. Subject verb agreement
3. Parallelism
4. Tenses

And few commonly repeated topics in every competitive exam. So make your list of commonly repeated questions which will help you solve sentence correction questions in the exam.

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