Average students need to be prepared mentally to spend lots of time practicing in order to crack CAT. Everyone has gaps in Math or English or DILR and has to practice long hours.



Any person who is presently above the 60 percentile can be called average and can crack CAT. Just that the time required doing it may change depending on the gaps. But a reasonable six to eight months of daily practice (2/3 hours) can do the trick. People below 60 percentile can also do it, but will need to get back to their school math books. Go through tuitions, and then start the preparation.



Process orientation: CAT is a test of aptitude and therefore ‘the 5 shortcuts to crack CAT in 30 days’ doesn’t work. The ‘get rich quick’ schemes don’t work. The short cuts to solve math, and the mathematical approach to RC are all very tempting because they all form part of the ‘get rich quick’ schemes. But the only thing that really works in CAT preparation is ‘fundamental’ sweaty hard work and following a process sincerely.



A thorough work would be required on the basics and repeated practice sessions.



Verbal: Reading purposefully different kinds of articles, books, etc. is the only solution. The reading should be followed by reflection on the purpose, tone, main theme, sub plots, inferences etc. If this is done sincerely for six to eight months, along with the practice tests and Mocks, VARC can become one’s high scoring section.



Scoring high in this section makes it so much easier to get to overall 99.xx percentile. This is the only section that does not need outside information like formulae or knowledge. Everything is given. Only thing is that you need to make the right sense out of it. Average students can improve enough to actually score 70 + (CAT 2019), if they do not try any fancy stuff and just stick to the fundamentals.



Quants: This is a freak-out area for short cuts, which is pure marketing hype. It’s mostly the average students who get impressed by the short cuts. They are actually weak in their basics and start to think erroneously that all Math problems can be solved logically.



What are these short cuts? Every problem can be solved in multiple creative ways.



But the question is ‘which method can the average student replicate safely in the CAT?’ Unless a particular creative method (short cut) works for a whole category of problems, they are not taught. The conventional method is far safer. More practice sessions will yield more creative, accurate and faster results.



In CAT 2019, there were at least 20 to 22 problems that could have been done by the average student who has worked hard on the basics. They could have been done conventionally at an average of 2 minutes per question. That would have fetched a score of anything above 45, which is in the 95 plus percentiles.



DILR: Getting exposed to as many types of problems is the only solution. Doing about 60 to 70 tests, including mocks, will lead to exposure to around 400 sets of DILR problems. Doing this over a few months would ensure accurately solving 3 to 4 sets comfortably in CAT. That’s at least 40 marks.



Adding them all up (70+45+40)= 155.. which is 99 percentile in CAT 2019. The mix might very well change depending on one’s personal strengths.



Bottom line is that, with six to eight months of systematic 18/20 hours of weekly practice, one can crack CAT. The primary target should be to follow a process to build your fundamentals without trying any fancy stuff.