My CAT Journey (2020–21)
In BITS, every year a talk titled ‘CAT Champs’ is held, where CAT achievers from our college discuss their strategy and experience regarding belling the CAT. I had attended a few of these talks, and that had got me intrigued — what’s so special about this exam, and why do the toppers recommend 100 days of prep ?
I was in my 7th semester of B.E. in Computer Science at BITS Pilani, and had got an offer from Cult.Fit (in early August). Consequently, there wasn’t much to do in that semester (it being a psenti-sem). As a result, I picked up the habit of book-reading. Alongside, I started contemplating — shall I write CAT or not ? I had no plans to go for an MBA, and just wanted to see what all the fuss about CAT was about. So, I started filling the arduous registration form.
It was September 23rd, the last day for registration( as far as I can remember, It was the extended deadline — the original was a week earlier) and fee-payment. At around 4:30 p.m., I resumed the form-filling from where I had left it earlier. At 4:40 p.m., I asked my dad whether I should go ahead with filling the form — since I wasn’t going for an MBA anyway — and my dad nodded. I myself rejected that suggestion — but only for the next 15 minutes — thinking that I’d rather spend these Rs. 2000 buying a Netflix subscription, and put my laptop to sleep.
However, at 4:55 p.m., I’d wake it up again, being possessed by the thoughts of testing myself out in the pool of competition — 3 years after the JEE days, and shelled out Rs. 2000, which would later transform my life.
Build-up to the CAT exam
Although I had registered already for the test, I was not sure whether I’d be going for it, because of a possible COVID scare. Being the miser that I was, I wasn’t going to spend money on a test series for something I possibly wasn’t going for :P . So naturally, I just solved one paper — the one available on iimcat.ac.in, in order to acquaint myself with the exam pattern. In my school days, I used to participate in a lot of competitions/Olympiads involving mental ability and logical reasoning, and I was fairly comfortable in these topics — in fact, I love solving puzzles. So, I didn’t feel the need for practising that either.
The CAT experience
The CAT exam was scheduled on 29th November, 2020 . I had had a surgery 2–3 weeks prior, and wasn’t in the best of health. Plus, the COVID scare. Nevertheless, the competitive urge took me to the exam center.
I was having the 3rd slot — 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm — and by that time, the exam pattern was out. The first section was VARC, and I breezed through it. I attempted 25/26 questions there, and left 1 out of boredom.
The next section, LIDR, was a ripper. There were 2 sets having 6 questions each, and 3 sets having 4 questions each. I tried aiming for 6-pointers, and finished the first set in 14 minutes. For the next 20 minutes, nothing happened. I froze — since I had not even looked at the 4-pointers, and the set where I had already invested 20 minutes, turned out to be the toughest set across all 3 slots ! Nevertheless, I gathered some courage, and started employing the perennial trick — substituting and eliminating the wrong options. I was able to solve 1 question thus, and using that answer, I could answer the next 3. So, attempted questions : 10/24 .
When I started the Quant section, I didn’t know what a good score in Quant would be. I couldn’t solve the few initial questions — but then got going. During the exam itself, I set incremental targets — like I’d try to attempt 8 questions, then 10, 12 , 14 , so on. I ended up doing 17/26 questions with no guess-marking.
Results
When the answer key came out, I figured that I was scoring 126/228. According to the rank predictors and Youtube analyses, it meant getting somewhere around 99.6x percentile, which I thought was amazing, because I thought that anything beyond 99 is good (I later realized that this can’t be further from truth).
On January 2nd, the results came out. My friend, Kharbanda, called me and told me that a friend of his had scored 130 and got 99.91 percentile, which I thought was too good to be true. I hurriedly checked my results, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had secured 99.83 percentile :O
Amidst all the Congratulatory messages, a question then popped up — Was I actually going for the interviews/IIMs ?
(To be continued .. )