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A lot has been written and said about catching the CAT that bugs around 1,50,000 aspirants every year. From hard work to picking up questions smartly, from choosing accuracy over
speed to managing time effectively & efficiently, from excelling in your strengths to ameliorating in your weak sections by persistence, from applying to the right B-school to aiming for the best & so on.

But the fact is, what works for me might not work for you and the otherwise is also true. As I write this, only a few last days are left till the D'day. These days CAN change your life. These days CAN create a ladder for that dream gig you always aspired for.

"Strategy" is a very powerful word. Strategy is what Bill Gates uses to hire and retain some of the best heads in the software world - by giving them stock options. Strategy is what has made every sound & informed investor rich in the current Indian bull market and strategy is the same as the shot Tendulkar has selected to play or not to play, as per the field set up, if a particular type of ball is bowled to him. It's hard to imagine all these people without this skill of anticipating and improvising, which they use in their respective unpredictable fields.

Thankfully CAT is equally unpredictable. Having a strategy or a set of strategies is as important as hard work that we all put in, and opening the test and starting from 1st question is not a good one.

Truly said, first know your strength / strengths and then your second strength. It makes perfect sense to give your favorite section more time and limiting to the cut-off in the others, rather than by going 40-40-40 in the 120 minutes allotted. Now there are two ways of going about it, either by giving the 45-55 minutes in one go to your favorite section or by 30-35 in first go & coming again in the last 10-15 minutes of the test. For example, you start with Quantitative Analysis Section and give it 10 more minutes in the dying moments. Nobody can analyze the entire paper perfectly in the first two minutes, like we are all told to do. By going back to my favorite or second favorite section in the end, I end up having more knowledge about the paper thus having more chances of selecting the attemptable set of questions. Try this strategy in the mocks and see how it works for you.

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* Contributed by -
Pramod Sood is employed with the Retail Loans Division of a private sector bank for the past three years & is aspiring for CAT this year.