MBA aspirants perceive CAT to be the toughest entrance exam. Why not? After all, more than 2.1 lakh students is seeking admission to 20,000 seats available in the top-30 B-schools in India this year (2015). Students preparing for CAT exam consider it to be a make or break thing. Cracking CAT exam does not require anxiety; in fact, you need an optimal strategy that guarantees your success. You should neither overestimate your capability nor should you underestimate your strengths. Don’t make a mess of the exam. Here are the three things which if you will not avoid can decrease your chances to clear the CAT exam:

Blind guessing – NO NO!
Many students in their urge to score good in the CAT exam try out the guesswork strategy. You mean really? Blind guesswork should never be part of your CAT exam. Some people suggest to do “Intelligent Guessing” in which you select an answer based on some solid assumptions. CAT is a more of an accuracy test now. Intelligent guessing is applicable on topics in which you have gained sufficient level of expertise after much practice.

Wasting too much time on one question
MBA aspirants should give 2-3 minutes to solve one question. Just think of a situation wherein you wasted 5 minutes on solving a single question. After wasting 5 minutes you’re still not able to solve the problem. You waste 5 more minutes. When you still don’t get answer to that question, you decide to leave it and solve other questions. The extra 7 minute wasted by you on single question would have helped you in solving three more questions. Think about the consequences of not attempting three questions because of the lack of time despite you knew the answer! There are minimum 20% questions which can be labeled as easy questions in any CAT paper. If you miss any of these questions because you wasted too much time solving a difficult question is a BIG mistake.

Not having answering strategy
A CAT paper has a mix of easy and difficult questions. Don’t think that one liner question will be an easy one. One liners can be tough too! So identifying which are easy and which ones are not is a difficult task. Don’t expect a particular type of CAT paper and make your strategies around this paper set. Your answering strategy should be based on the accuracy, speed and your level of preparation.

CAT is not an exam to prove your strengths in specific subjects; you need to prove your overall ability. The success mantra that will work while taking the CAT 2015 exam is understanding what your strengths are and working on your weaknesses.