Introduction
When I took my first mock test for CAT, in may 2008, I managed 99+ percentile in QA, DI and Overall but just a lowly 75%ile in Verbal. Although, my english was not that poor, having done my schooling in English medium school and scoring 90+ in CBSE 10th and 12th standard English. I thought it was a mere aberration, and a bit of work here and there will fix things up. The trend continued for 4 mocks, I kept missing verbal cutoffs by good margins. The alarm bells were not just ringing, they were shouting, ” VA needs to be fixed”. Thereafter I worked on VA day in day out and result is for world to see- A score of 76/160 in CAT 2008 verbal( 99.5%ile). A remarkable turnaround- Lets see how I made it.
The Mocks
After the initial few mocks, I had realised, there was no way I could ignore VA any further. I sat down with my mocks again and analysed where I was going wrong, I was making errors in RC sections especially the abstract RCs, or with RCs wherein the options were very close. In the grammar part, I was making errors in sentence correction, fill in the blanks, para completion, para jumbles- just about everything. I discussed with friends and seniors, and then decided I will try to work and make some kind of questions my strengths. After practice, I found that paracompletion, parajumbles and fouble fill in the blanks were the most logical and there is high degree of acuracy with which they can be solved, so I started working on those. I solved all the VA sets related to these areas in past CAT papers and kept practising. I could see the improvement in the mocks, and continued on my efforts to make things perfect.
Reading
But still, I was not upto the mark, RC heavy mocks were still a trouble for me, I consulted a few experts for this and they told me that READING was the only solution, and I believe thats the best advice I have ever got. From then on I started reading extensively from www.guardian.co.uk ( news, blog and comments section), www.economist.com ( all articles, especially International politics, environment and Economics) and www.discovery.com ( for science). If you see closely, the three sites I have listed deal with almost all kind of RC passages that can come, Guardian helped in art, literature, Economist covered business, politics and environment and Discovery covered science and other issues. Thus, I got into habit of reading all kinds of stuff, it helped me a lot, as I found what kind of passages are to my liking. Which passages are easier to comprehend. While reading, I tried to understand the meanings of new words in context.
I kept reading short passages, and first question I would ask what is the central idea of that passage. Then what kind of questions could be framed from those passages in CAT. This attitude helped me to understand the passages better. During the preparation I also read a few books, Kite Runner, Thousand Splendid Suns, The Arguemenatative Indian, Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Inheritance of Loss. The aim was set, to break all inhibitions, and be able to follow the style of any author, to be able to grasp the core of a passage in just one reading.
How Things Have Changed Now?
With CAT going online, it’s absolutely necessary to get into a habit of reading online for longer periods of time. If you are a beginner, you can start with editorials of The Hindu or www.frontline.in, then slowly move to the three sites I have mentioned before. You can also try to read ebooks of novels, a lot of them are freely available on the net, via project gutenburg.
Put Into Practice
All the above I have said will help you, only if you follow it on a daily basis, it takes time and effort to improve upon an area you are weak at. Keep working, check for improvements in your mocks, it will show, if isn’t you need to try a bit harder.
Never Be Disheartened
During my preparation, I was faced with this problem, the results were not showing, i kept failing to clear cutoffs, I cleared a total of 6 cutoffs in verbal out of the 18 mocks, I felt like giving up. But still, I kept working as I wanted to prove a point to myself, I couldn’t let verbal to stop me. So keep working.
Advice
Never read questions first during CAT. Generally the RCs which come in CAT are dense, the answer to any question is there at more than one place. So if you read questions first, you are highly likely to mark an answer as soon as you spot it in the passage, and go to the next question. And there you will get it wrong. Give a thorough reading of the passage, read questions, try to answer as many as you can. If you are nto sure, just try to locate the answers now. Remember, it is not necessary to answer all the questions of a particular RC. If a RC has 5 questions, it is perfectly fine if you attemt 3 questions and get them all right, rather than attempting 5 and getting 2 wrong. You save time and gain more marks.
Do not underline while you read. Most of us do it, but with online CAT, you won’t be able to do that, so get into a habit of reading without a pen/pencil.
Good Luck!
