So finally I’m done with CAT 09! Arguably the most talked about, the most attempted and the most competitive entrance exam in the world, as they say. And my favorite part about it -being able to play on the word itself! ( CATalyst of stress, CATapult to glory, using the mouse to bell the CAT and of course " CAT '0 Nine tale" as the title of this post, among all..
So for the sake of a little CAT background. I sleepwalked through CAT 08 not sure about what I wanted to do in future, your typical college student- without a clue, taking it just as an experience to get a taste of what the fuss was all about. The result? That I never bothered to even check until 2 months later when my result was snail mailed home!! A bleak ( in an MBA aspirant’s view) 75% percentile, which I wasn’t really distraught about, taking comfort in the fact, that without any preparation, I did better than 74.9 people of the 2,00,000 odd people that wrote it, right! Wrong. Cos it also meant that that 50,000 people did better. ( if the Math in that wrong, you know, why!) And in all of the top 25 best Indian schools put together, the seats on offer are just about a few thousand.
Fast forward to this year. I graduated in June. In about late August, realization dawned that it was time to get off my bum and pave the way for a future, which didn’t involve just watching movies and facebooking’ all day.
Either a) Apply to a university abroad like most of my batch- mates, which wouldn’t be so tough as getting admission in a top Indian b-School long as you have the monies, live another tension-free year, party, come back and then worry about the future. OR join the bandwagon of the lacs of people with dreams of getting an MBA from the Ivy Leagues of India such as the IIMs (with the very tempting prospects of a creamy future if successful ( Yeah how does a 7 figure salary for an IIM-A fresher sound?? )and more interestingly for me, MICA – the only Masters college in India I really wanted to be at, considering that it’s the only A-list institute for Communication and Advertising, fields I’m intrinsically interested in. ( They put the MICA in Monica. Don't kill me)
OK so how do I go about it? Since I’d had a shot at CAT last year, I knew what I had in store. What I didn’t know was how to go about preparing for it. Sure, I was confident about cutting my saviour “Verbal Ability” of the section. DI is fun and hence could be worked at. But what to do with “Quantitative Ability ” ?? A disability for me. A subject that I last touched in 10th and chose to slice that portion of my brain out the instant the board exam was over, being the classic left-brained person with a serious trouble with numbers. The biggest catch-22 was whether to join a basic Maths tuition to retrieve the basics in my head and then join the CAT-specific coaching institutes or both simultaneously or just one? Not wanting to shell out too much dough or time on something I had little hopes and even less passion about, decided to join the fast-track crash-course at Career launcher in Early September after much indecisiveness, which purported to at least help getting the cutoff in the all-intimidating Quant for me. In the meanwhile Google happened and as stuff-that-induces-confusion, would have it , I was offered a job there and suggested by most people, unanimously was to work there for as long as I enjoyed the “ Paid Vacation”, and do an MBA later. Preparations hitherto if any, were happily put on the backburner. But no harm in trying anyway.
So after about 2 months of coaching and about few hours ( In all!) of self-practice, I had a go at the first Online CAT finally yesterday amidst the ongoing buzz of its fiasco but hoping every minute that I’d be one of the “victims” of it, so that maybe I could just blame the system for a bad show or get a later date and maybe just maybe, gather some questions from the people who’ve done it before and by a fly of luck get the same questions and at least not end up with a negative score in quant!( Lol..talk about clutching at the straws!)
But no, everything went smoothly, all too smoothly…I reached on time and after an hour’s idle wait at my centre, the check-in process started and we were directed to a lab where after instructions the test started! And Voila I had Verbal Ability first which eased my pre-exam jitters but also in a way ruined the paper for me. Rather lost in solving the VA section and little realizing that the timer on the system was running faster than sound, I had all of 55 minutes to do both Quant and Di!! Di was the next section and by now I had smelled trouble and somehow attempted 10 questions, with trembling hands and by the time I had come to quant, the timer told me that I had all of 20 mins left!! In normal times it takes me some 20 minutes to solve ( if at all) about 4 questions max! But under a pressure cooker here, I could barely solve 3! ( Out of 20) Rest 2 were guesstimates which boils down to Hari-kari in an exam like CAT where one negative mark can bring down your percentile by a large margin….
So there go my chances of anything positive coming out of CAT 09 for me, apart from the realization about how time-management and intense practice IS really the key to belling the CAT. I can't say I'm not upset; but I have no one no blame (unfortunately not even Prometric) for my rather CATastrophic performance but my absolute lack of hardwork, practice and focus as far was preparing for CAT was concerned…Having said that, it would've really helped if we were given an option to attempt sections in the order we preferred and being able to attempt any question at random rather than going through each question, deciding whether to attempt it or not and then clicking to move on to the next question. Hope the thousands of people demanding a retest of CAT 09 are heard ;-)
Meanwhile, Google here I mostly come.
So for the sake of a little CAT background. I sleepwalked through CAT 08 not sure about what I wanted to do in future, your typical college student- without a clue, taking it just as an experience to get a taste of what the fuss was all about. The result? That I never bothered to even check until 2 months later when my result was snail mailed home!! A bleak ( in an MBA aspirant’s view) 75% percentile, which I wasn’t really distraught about, taking comfort in the fact, that without any preparation, I did better than 74.9 people of the 2,00,000 odd people that wrote it, right! Wrong. Cos it also meant that that 50,000 people did better. ( if the Math in that wrong, you know, why!) And in all of the top 25 best Indian schools put together, the seats on offer are just about a few thousand.
Fast forward to this year. I graduated in June. In about late August, realization dawned that it was time to get off my bum and pave the way for a future, which didn’t involve just watching movies and facebooking’ all day.
Either a) Apply to a university abroad like most of my batch- mates, which wouldn’t be so tough as getting admission in a top Indian b-School long as you have the monies, live another tension-free year, party, come back and then worry about the future. OR join the bandwagon of the lacs of people with dreams of getting an MBA from the Ivy Leagues of India such as the IIMs (with the very tempting prospects of a creamy future if successful ( Yeah how does a 7 figure salary for an IIM-A fresher sound?? )and more interestingly for me, MICA – the only Masters college in India I really wanted to be at, considering that it’s the only A-list institute for Communication and Advertising, fields I’m intrinsically interested in. ( They put the MICA in Monica. Don't kill me)
OK so how do I go about it? Since I’d had a shot at CAT last year, I knew what I had in store. What I didn’t know was how to go about preparing for it. Sure, I was confident about cutting my saviour “Verbal Ability” of the section. DI is fun and hence could be worked at. But what to do with “Quantitative Ability ” ?? A disability for me. A subject that I last touched in 10th and chose to slice that portion of my brain out the instant the board exam was over, being the classic left-brained person with a serious trouble with numbers. The biggest catch-22 was whether to join a basic Maths tuition to retrieve the basics in my head and then join the CAT-specific coaching institutes or both simultaneously or just one? Not wanting to shell out too much dough or time on something I had little hopes and even less passion about, decided to join the fast-track crash-course at Career launcher in Early September after much indecisiveness, which purported to at least help getting the cutoff in the all-intimidating Quant for me. In the meanwhile Google happened and as stuff-that-induces-confusion, would have it , I was offered a job there and suggested by most people, unanimously was to work there for as long as I enjoyed the “ Paid Vacation”, and do an MBA later. Preparations hitherto if any, were happily put on the backburner. But no harm in trying anyway.
So after about 2 months of coaching and about few hours ( In all!) of self-practice, I had a go at the first Online CAT finally yesterday amidst the ongoing buzz of its fiasco but hoping every minute that I’d be one of the “victims” of it, so that maybe I could just blame the system for a bad show or get a later date and maybe just maybe, gather some questions from the people who’ve done it before and by a fly of luck get the same questions and at least not end up with a negative score in quant!( Lol..talk about clutching at the straws!)
But no, everything went smoothly, all too smoothly…I reached on time and after an hour’s idle wait at my centre, the check-in process started and we were directed to a lab where after instructions the test started! And Voila I had Verbal Ability first which eased my pre-exam jitters but also in a way ruined the paper for me. Rather lost in solving the VA section and little realizing that the timer on the system was running faster than sound, I had all of 55 minutes to do both Quant and Di!! Di was the next section and by now I had smelled trouble and somehow attempted 10 questions, with trembling hands and by the time I had come to quant, the timer told me that I had all of 20 mins left!! In normal times it takes me some 20 minutes to solve ( if at all) about 4 questions max! But under a pressure cooker here, I could barely solve 3! ( Out of 20) Rest 2 were guesstimates which boils down to Hari-kari in an exam like CAT where one negative mark can bring down your percentile by a large margin….
So there go my chances of anything positive coming out of CAT 09 for me, apart from the realization about how time-management and intense practice IS really the key to belling the CAT. I can't say I'm not upset; but I have no one no blame (unfortunately not even Prometric) for my rather CATastrophic performance but my absolute lack of hardwork, practice and focus as far was preparing for CAT was concerned…Having said that, it would've really helped if we were given an option to attempt sections in the order we preferred and being able to attempt any question at random rather than going through each question, deciding whether to attempt it or not and then clicking to move on to the next question. Hope the thousands of people demanding a retest of CAT 09 are heard ;-)
Meanwhile, Google here I mostly come.
