Quantitative cues

Updated on: Monday, September 07, 2009

The quantitative aptitude section is perhaps one area which represents the biggest challenge for students appearing for the CAT. If you need proof of this, all you need to do is consider the following facts about the CAT 2008 paper:

Fact #1 : With 0 marks (yes, zero), you would have scored 20 percentile in quants. In CAT 2008, of the approximately 2.75 lakh students who appeared for the exam, 55,000 students did not even make it to 20 percentile in the quants section, ie, they were not even able to ensure a positive score.

Fact #2 : On the other hand, if you scored 12 marks in the quants section in the paper, your score would shoot up to 65 percentile. This essentially means that the approximately 1.8 lakh CAT 2008 aspirants, who were unable to score 65 percentile or more, didn’t manage to notch up even 12 marks out of 100 in the quants section.

What is even more amazing is that every question carried four marks, which means that in order to score just 12 marks, you would only need to solve three questions. This in turn means that if you distributed your time equally across three sections, you would have 50 minutes to solve just three questions — a mind-boggling 16 to 17 minutes per question.

Fact #3 : If you were to count the number of questions that appeared from the chapters ‘Number systems’ and ‘Progressions’ (just two of the 18 or 20 chapters a CAT aspirant will cover, or as we are about to define below, one of the six blocks of chapters you have to study for the quants section of the CAT), hold your breath. There were 10 questions from these two chapters alone.

Moreover, this question distribution pattern is an open secret as far as the CAT preparation goes. Over the past 15 years, 40% of the marks in the CAT have comprised questions from the chapters on ‘Numbers’ and ‘Progressions’. Hence, everyone who took the CAT in 2008 should have been aware of this fact.

So why didn’t CAT 2008 aspirants manage to secure the necessary percentile in the quants section? Was there an aspect that was not apparent to them? What did students who prepared for CAT 2008 miss out on? This is hardly new for the CAT — students have always missed fairly obvious aspects during the test. If you were to look at some of the questions, which have been tested in the CAT quants section over the past decade, you would be forced to rethink whether the CAT really is as tough an exam as it’s made out to be.

The first thing you need to ensure to not make the same mistakes, is change your focus, when studying quantitative aptitude, from covering the syllabus to creating reactions to questions.

What does this mean? You need to realise that solving a question in the calm environs of your home is very different from the experience of solving a question in a pressure-intensive environment that the real CAT creates — a variable that is only likely to become more pronounced with the computer-based test.

‘Handling pressure’ is one of the most crucial variables you need to deal with when preparing for the quants section, something that most students fail to do. Obviously, the foremost question in your mind then, is: “What should I do in order to develop my ability to handle pressure?”

Firstly, you need to conduct a pressure audit. Look at your past experiences with handling pressure. Ask yourself questions like, ‘how much does pressure affect you?’ Evaluate your experiences with previous exams like your board exams and engineering and/or medical and other entrance tests. How did you respond to the inherent pressure those exams created?

This will show that you could have been affected in one of two ways only:

1. Pressure improves your performance

2. Pressure worsens your performance

If you, unfortunately, belong to the second category of students, then you would be doing yourself a big favour by creating reactions to standard quantitative situations. Remember, pressure can only toy with an individual’s mind in situations where he/she has time to think.

When you react immediately to something that is presented to you, pressure and the related anxiety that comes with it, do not have the time to play with your mind. However, if you have to think through a problem-solving situation while taking the exam, then there is great likelihood that your straight logical line of thought will be compromised.

The best way to prepare for the CAT, especially as far as quantitative aptitude goes, is to not allow your mind the time needed to get up to its bagful of tricks.

More on this, and what you can do to facilitate your preparations for the new computer-based CAT in our next article in this series.

Timesofindia

Quantitative cues

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