Entrance Preparation & Study Plan
Entrance Preparation & Study Plan
A study plan that you develop yourself or center around yourself will go a long way toward helping you reach your goal. Develop a realistic plan that's established according to your needs and schedule, and supports the way you learn. This allows you to stick to your study plan and learn at your own pace, which contributes to the learning process. As the exam nears, you will need to create a plan to help you study effectively and minimize stress. The first step is to figure out how much time and effort you must dedicate to studying for the exam by asking the following questions:
How much material do you need to cover?
How difficult is the material?
How much time is available?
Do you have any other priorities during the study period?
What is the format of the exam?
How important is the exam?
What is your performance target for the exam?
To prepare the study plan, map out all of the material that has to be covered and make a schedule showing what, when and how much you will study each day. If you have kept up with the course work, studying will involve revision of the material that you have already covered. If you are behind in the course, you will have to finish the readings and other uncompleted work before starting the revision (if there isn't enough time to go over everything, you must decide what is most important for the exam).
Here are some tips to follow in creating your study plan
1. budget your time realistically;
2. allocate the study time into several manageable study sessions;
3. divide the course material into small segments and assign them to the study sessions;
4. set clear and specific goals for the study sessions;
5. prioritize to ensure that material weighted more heavily in the exam gets sufficient study time;
6. take into account your familiarity with the material and the difficulty level;
7. don't make the study sessions too long;
8. No noise. A noisy area can increase stress while studying. Avoid studying with the television or radio on. Pick a quiet place like your local library to study.
9. study sessions should have enough variety in terms of topics and activities to prevent boredom and loss of effectiveness;
10. Assess yourself. Take diagnostic or practice tests. Analyze the result. Mark the areas you could consider your weak areas. Concentrate on these areas when you begin studying.
11. avoid cramming before the exam; and
12. don't forget to include regular breaks.
So, understand why the Entrance Test (you are sitting for) is important to you. When preparing for the Exams, prepare through small, well-planned steps. Accomplish each step; build upon them. Then use these accomplishments as additional benefits and motivators to move you closer to the final achievementWish you all the success !
I collected last 7 CAT papers and classified every question according to the topic. Then I summed up the marks for questions in every topic and found the percentage occurrence of marks for each topic. The result for CAT Quant is shown below:
There! You have it. Algebra- 37.6% by marks, Geometry- 22.8% by marks, Number system- 21.6% by marks and ratio and proportion- 11.2% by marks. Enlightenment provided by past 8 CAT papers!
I did the same exercise for the verbal section and the results are summarized below.
Notice that RC again takes 50% of the whole verbal section. Then come grammar and usage, fill in the blanks, and jumbled paragraphs.
I left the DI section as there is fundamental prescribed category for logical questions. Though, I am sure that I can find some sort of classification in the DI section also.
The answer to CAT preparation came in a flash, and it was perfectly logical and full of common sense.
Time Table
Count the duration, in days, from the time you start your CAT preparation to August 31st. After August, you will be busy in taking those mock CATs and you will hardly have any time for studies. Therefore, if you are starting your CAT preparation on 1st of May, you have roughly 120 days of study time.
Assume that you will get 75% of these days for studies. The rest 25% will be lost in sleeping, watching movies or just staring at that nice girl living in the nearby building. Therefore, from May 1st to August 31st you have roughly 90 days of study time.
Assume that you will study 4 hours everyday. These 4 hours are separate from the time spent in reading newspapers or attending any CAT coaching. Also, if you study more, do the calculations in your own way. From those 4 hours, devote 2 hours to quant, 1 hour to Verbal, and 1 hour to DI. Therefore, given 90 days of study time, you have 180 hours to study quant, 90 hours for Verbal, and 90 hours for DI.
Break down those study hours according to percentage breakup of the various topics given in the table above. For example, from 180 hours of quant you should have 22% devoted to Number system. Therefore, you need to devote roughly 40 hours to Number system.
Once you have number of hours, planning becomes simpler. Just start from the highest occurring topic and move to the lowest occurring topic. The beauty of this method is that you would have covered the most important topic at the beginning of your preparations and even if you are not able to cover the least important ones because of lack of time, it would not hurt you so much!
For those who are attending any CAT coaching, if the topics covered in the coaching are different from the ones you are studying according to your plan, then you need to study hard during your coaching classes. Do the class exercises there itself. Pay attention the instructor and study as much as you can in the class itself.
To practice RC passages, download 1000 RC file from the ‘Download’ section of TotalGadha and do 3 RC everyday. Practice the RC techniques I discussed in the ‘RC strategy’ article.
Study Material
Besides the material given in your coaching, you can also follow these to enhance your preparations:
Number System- Lessons and Quizzes on Total Gadha. I am unashamed to say this; the lessons and problems on Total Gadha are one of the best. While I was teaching at a premier CAT coaching institute, my lessons on Number System were unofficially given to Math faculties to help them prepare for their classes. And I keep adding new material whenever I find something interesting.
Geometry- NCERT books VIII, IX and X, and Total Gadha. When it comes to geometry, the NCERT books are matchless. You don’t need to look any further. It is surprising but geometry questions in CAT are still below NCERT level. For higher level questions, refer to Total Gadha.
Algebra- Hall and Knight higher Algebra- The following chapters are a must do from this gem of a book: ratio and proportion, arithmetic progression, geometric progression, logarithms, permutation and combination, quadratic equation, probability and theory of equations. There is also a very good chapter on Number theory for those who want to read more.
General Math- Quantitative Aptitude for CAT by Pradeep Pandey. A good quant book.
Data Interpretation- Those who have never encountered logical reasoning question should certainly finish these:Puzzles and logical reasoning test on Total GadhaPuzzles and Teasers- by George SummersTricky Logic Puzzles- Norman D Willis.Past 5 years CAT Papers.
Grammar- Wren and Martin. Yes I know, most of you have seen this book thousand times in your school. Trust me, do this book 2- 3 times and you will not have to worry about the grammar section in CAT.
Usage- Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs- Collins Cobuild. Read it regularly if you have time. The dictionary gives you different phrasal verbs that can be formed with the same verb. For example, the verb ‘fall’ can give rise to phrasal verbs like fall about, fall apart, fall away, fall back, fall back on, fall behind, fall down, fall for, fall in, fall into, fall in with, fall off, fall on, fall out, fall over, fall through, fall to, and fall under. (Whew!) There are a lot of questions in CAT on usage of phrasal verbs.
Newspaper- The Hindu. There is not a single newspaper that can match the quality of The Hindu. The English is perfect (no puns or slangs), the editorials are very thought-provoking, and the news coverage is done in way that the paper does not take any sides. The paper lets its readers form their own opinions about the news. (My personal favorite is the ‘The Hindu Crossword’ which I’ve been solving for the last 7 years).
Books to read- Pick up the book list from here.
Magazine- The Economist. It is an expensive weekly American magazine but very indispensable if you want to get used to good English. Buy it and see for yourself.
Websites- http://www.epw.org.in/, http://www.sciam.com/, http://www.guardian.co.uk/. There are numerous others, but these three will do given the time that you have.