All about CAT

http://in.rediff.com/getahead/2005/nov/19cat7.htm

 Stress-free CAT
As D-day draws closer, Arun Sharma emphasises the importance of coping with pressure to improve overall performance in the CAT.
 Students are often unsure about their ability to crack the formidable CAT, and this belief has created the 'CAT is tough' myth, which gets propagated from year to year. A person getting 70 percentile in the CAT normally feels that the CAT was not meant for him.
 However, logically speaking, if you were to consider the data of the last CAT, each question carried four positive marks if it was answered correctly and one negative mark if incorrect. Also consider the fact that a student who got 70-80 percentile in CAT 2006 paper would have got a net score in the range of 75- 85 marks (out of 300), while a student who got a score of 110 marks in the same test ended up with a 98-99 percentile score. This means very clearly that there was a gap of only about 30 marks separating a 70 percentiler (who ends up considering that he/she was too far away from clearing the CAT for the IIMs) from a student who might now be studying at the IIMs. At the rate of five marks per question (+4,-1 marking scheme) this would effectively translate into a gap of just six questions!
  In other words just six errors can take you from a B-grade B-school straight into the IIMs. This is the reason why what you do in the remaining preparation time becomes very crucial.
 Improving your test-taking behaviour is one of the key factors to developing your scores in the last few weeks of your CAT preparation, and coping with exam hall pressure is a crucial issue that needs to be resolved.
 Students end up making all kinds of silly errors due to the pressure that they face in the CAT. The fact that even class three students would not make such errors proves that perhaps there is some logic as to why students from IIT commit such errors during the CAT.
 Thus there is a crucial dimension to CAT preparation (other than quants, data and verbal ability and reading comprehension) that students and trainers miss out entirely during their preparation. In short, this dimension can be called as the 'pressure handling dimension'.
 CAT aspirants could perhaps take a lesson or two from champions in the field of sports, who tend to have an uncanny ability to execute their skills best when under pressure. So how can you learn to do the same?
 The answer is fairly simple: there is a difference between preparing to the level of understanding something and preparing to the level of execution for the same thing. Most CAT aspirants fail to recognise this difference. Their preparation stops at the inquiry - 'Do I understand this question? Yes I do, hence I am free to move on'. The result is that when faced in an environment of pressure, such aspirants are not able to tackle the question at hand.

The following question illustrates this:
Q. What is the remainder when 123456..... 9596979899100 is divided by 32?
Options:
a) 0
b)16
c)8
d)None of these.
The solution is based on two elementary reactions.
First:
 In the given expression, the numerator is a multiple of 4 but not of 8. Hence, after cutting both the numerator and the denominator by 4, the above expression can be reduced to (308..... 25/8).
Second:
 (308..... 25/8) will give us an odd remainder. Hence, the remainder to the entire question will be an odd multiple of 4. None of the first three options is an odd multiple of 4 since 0,16 and 8 are all even multiples of 4. Hence the answer is 'd'.
 The message you need to understand is: The best way to ensure that you get rid of silly errors during the examination is to reach the point where you have a reflex reaction to all mathematical or databased information.
 If you are able to solve something in practice, it does not mean that you will be able to execute it during the examination. There is a gap between the point where you have the ability to do something in practice and getting to the point where you can execute the same thing under pressure. Be sure to reach that point in your preparation before D-Day. All the best!
 The writer is a CAT trainer and the author of bestselling books on ‘How to prepare for the CAT’ published by McGraw- Hill Education India.