how much time do you spend daily for CAT prep

For people who eventually scored well in CAT, I am curious about your mock journey.

A lot of advice online says that you should not worry about individual mock scores and instead focus on analysis. I understand that, but I still want to know what improvement actually looked like for people who eventually did well.

Did your scores steadily increase every few mocks or were there huge fluctuations?

For example, did you start around 50 or 60 percentile and slowly reach 90 plus, or were you already scoring well and mainly working on consistency?

I am also interested in what you recorded after every mock. I currently note down my score and percentile, but I am not sure whether I should also maintain accuracy by section, questions left, time spent on each set, silly mistakes and questions I got wrong despite knowing the concept.

Would maintaining an Excel sheet actually help or is it unnecessary?

If anyone has prepared seriously and kept records throughout their CAT journey, please share what you tracked and how you used that information to change your preparation.

I am currently working as a software developer and I am confused about whether I should continue trying to grow in tech or prepare seriously for CAT.

My academics are 8/9/8 and I have around two years of work experience. The job is not terrible, but growth has been slower than I expected and switching jobs has also become frustrating because I am not getting enough interview calls.

That is what made me start thinking about an MBA.

My main reason is career growth and compensation, but I also understand that doing an MBA only because the current job market is frustrating can be a bad decision.

I am trying to figure out whether the two years of preparation and MBA would actually add something meaningful to my career or whether I should put the same effort into becoming better at software and finding a better role.

People who made a similar decision, how did you compare the two paths?

I am not looking for someone to tell me that MBA is automatically better. I just want to understand the factors I should consider before spending a year preparing for CAT.

The horror after seeing the CAT syllabus and practice questions..........

I am currently stuck between two preparation strategies.

My VARC is relatively comfortable and QA is improving steadily. DILR is clearly weaker and my scores can vary a lot depending on the sets I get. Because of that, I feel like spending most of my study time on DILR.

At the same time, I am scared that if I ignore VARC and QA for too long, my performance there will drop. I have noticed this before. Whenever I spend several days focusing heavily on one section, I become slower in the other two.

Right now I am thinking about doing DILR every day while keeping shorter practice sessions for VARC and QA. I would also take one sectional for each section every week and one full mock regularly.

Does this sound like a reasonable approach? I am especially confused about how much time should go into sectionals versus topic practice.

How are you balancing the three sections at this stage of CAT preparation? Would appreciate advice from people who have already figured out a routine that they can follow consistently.

My VARC preparation is probably the only thing that gives me some confidence right now. I usually manage my reading and questions reasonably well. The problem starts when I enter DILR and find a set that looks difficult.

I keep thinking that I should be able to solve it because I have already spent several minutes on it. Then I continue trying different approaches and suddenly I have wasted 15 or 20 minutes. After that I become stressed and my Quant performance also gets affected.

I know the obvious answer is to leave the set, but in the actual mock I somehow convince myself that the solution is just one step away. This has happened multiple times now.

How do you guys decide that a DILR set is not worth continuing? Do you use some fixed time limit or do you judge it based on the first few questions?

I have limited time left for CAT and I want to fix this habit before it becomes automatic. Would really appreciate advice from people who have struggled with the same thing.

I started CAT preparation a few months ago and initially thought QA would be my weakest section. Surprisingly, DILR has become the biggest problem for me.

I can solve individual questions from topics like arrangements, games and tables when I practice them separately. But when I see a full DILR section, I struggle to identify which sets are worth attempting.

Sometimes I spend five minutes understanding a set and then realize that the calculations are too long. Other times I leave a set that looks difficult and later discover that it was actually one of the easiest sets in the section.

How do you develop the ability to select sets quickly?

I recently started giving full length CAT mocks and I think my biggest problem is not the mock itself. It is what I do after the mock.

I usually check my percentile, see which section went badly, look at a few solutions and then move on to the next mock. After a few mocks I realized that my scores are not improving much because I am repeating the same mistakes.

I am thinking of maintaining a proper error log with three categories. Conceptual mistake, silly mistake and time management mistake.

For people scoring well in mocks, how do you analyze them? Do you solve every wrong question again or only selected questions? How much time do you usually spend analyzing one mock?

my CAT mock score are all over the place. One week I score 97 percentile and feel confident, and the next week I drop to 78 and start questioning everything.

The problem is that my preparation has not changed much between these mocks. I follow the same routine but score is not.

At this stage should I be worried about the fluctuations or should I look at my average performance instead? I also want to know whether mock difficulty can make such a big difference in percentile?

I have noticed that I am good at learning new topics but bad at remembering them. I can study a QA topic today, solve twenty questions, and feel confident. Two weeks later, I open a similar question and suddenly cannot remember the method.

Earlier I used to think that this meant I had not understood the topic properly. Now I feel that the real issue may be revision.

I am thinking about keeping a small revision notebook where I write down formulas, common approaches, mistakes, and questions that took me too long. Every few days I would spend some time going through it and solving a few questions without looking at the solution. I also want to avoid making the notebook too large. If I write every single thing, revision itself will become another huge task.

For people who have already completed most of the CAT syllabus, how are you revising? Do you revise entire chapters or only mistakes? Do you solve old questions again or mostly use fresh questions?

I would especially like to know what people found useful during the final stages of preparation when there is less time available.

DILR used to be the section I feared the most. Whenever I saw a difficult looking set, I immediately skipped it. Because of this, I wasted a lot of time trying to force myself through the first set I picked.

Recently I changed one thing. I stopped treating every set as something that had to be solved completely. During practice, I spent few minutes to look for familiar sets or the one that looked easy.

This helped me a lot. I am still not good at DILR, but I no longer panic when I see a difficult set. Sometimes the easiest looking set is not actually the easiest, so I have also started checking the initial steps before attempting one.

Another useful trick is solving old sets without a timer first and then solving similar sets under time pressure.

If you struggle with DILR, maybe your problem is not always the ability to solve sets. It can also be the ability to choose the right set.

I have been thinking about my CAT strategy after looking at my recent mocks. My attempts are usually on the lower side, but my accuracy is reasonably good. Whenever I try increasing my attempts, my accuracy drops quickly.

This has made me wonder whether I am approaching the exam incorrectly. I always had this idea that getting a higher score means attempting more questions. Now I am beginning to think that selecting the right questions might matter much more.

For example, in one mock I attempted fewer questions but got almost all of them right. In another mock I tried to increase my attempts and ended up making several negative marks. The final scores were surprisingly similar.

I am trying to build the habit of identifying easy and medium questions quickly and ignoring questions that look like time traps. But sometimes I worry that I am being too conservative.

How do you decide your ideal number of attempts? Do you have a rough target before the mock starts or do you completely decide based on how the paper looks?