Ashmant Tiwari, JBIMS Batch of 2010
A week to go for CET!! The time brings nostalgia to me. Three years back, at this time of the year, I was an aspirant, and was working towards fine-tuning my CET preparations in the last week. A question arose in my mind at that point: Could something really be done in the last week? And as I analyzed my preparation and the demands of the paper, the answer was an unequivocal "Yes". In this article, I'll share with you a few things which I planned for my last week of preparation and could implement successfully.
These were:
1) Speed reading: In a speed test such as the CET, time is costlier than money. I have observed that as people go on in their preparation; their reading speed tends to dip. On the D-day, this could mean that you spend extra 10 minutes in solving verbal; the same time could have fetched you atleast 4-5 marks. And that could make or break your chances of getting into Bajaj. So you could do a simple exercise every day: reading the newspaper while holding it UPSIDE DOWN. This little exercise makes your mind work as you read, and will give you an extra bit of speed as well as grasping ability in the verbal section on D-day.
2) Visual reasoning: You may be great at visual reasoning, or may just make the cut. In either case, your first target in the paper would be to crack atleast all the easy ones, and to crack them fast. That would require a good revision of all the easy VR questions that you have done in your preparation. Now no fancy stuff is required or recommended in the last week. However, you should identify and crack the ones that require basic logic in a jiffy. So revisit such easy VR questions.
3) Verbal ability: It does happen a lot of times that a weak argument by your judgement is a strong one by the mock test keys. What you perceive as definitely false turns out to be definitely true. Or what was a sure shot wrong usage of grammar as per you turns out to be the only correct option. Now one week isn't exactly an ideal timespan to actually improve your verbal skills. But yes, you can analyze your mocks for mistakes where you lacked the idea of a particular grammatical usage, or couldn't connect the central theme of the paragraph to the proposed argument, or maybe couldn't judge whether some information was directly given in the paragraph or was merely implied. If such revision saves you 5 mistakes in the exam hall, the revision has served its purpose nicely.
4) Mental calculations: Just pickup a few calculative DI sets, and try to arrive at the answers mentally. In the paper, you will encounter many DI questions where mental calculations or smart guess-works are absolutely essential. Many a time, you need to find a bare minimum value for an option so that you can eliminate the option values lesser than it. Sometimes you will need to know how much four successive growths could affect a value. Sometimes you will need to convert various values into similar numerator/denominator ratios so that you can arrange them in increasing/decreasing order. Touch upon all these little tricks which will boost your D-day scoring.
Signing off, I'd like to mention one important fact: The paper is not an insurmountable challenge. If it were to be, then we people at JBDON wouldn't be writing these articles. You too can make it to a top B-school!! So just focus yourself on these areas and do very calculated work in the last week. Write the paper with a very balanced mind, and emerge on top
!!All the very best!!
These were:
1) Speed reading: In a speed test such as the CET, time is costlier than money. I have observed that as people go on in their preparation; their reading speed tends to dip. On the D-day, this could mean that you spend extra 10 minutes in solving verbal; the same time could have fetched you atleast 4-5 marks. And that could make or break your chances of getting into Bajaj. So you could do a simple exercise every day: reading the newspaper while holding it UPSIDE DOWN. This little exercise makes your mind work as you read, and will give you an extra bit of speed as well as grasping ability in the verbal section on D-day.
2) Visual reasoning: You may be great at visual reasoning, or may just make the cut. In either case, your first target in the paper would be to crack atleast all the easy ones, and to crack them fast. That would require a good revision of all the easy VR questions that you have done in your preparation. Now no fancy stuff is required or recommended in the last week. However, you should identify and crack the ones that require basic logic in a jiffy. So revisit such easy VR questions.
3) Verbal ability: It does happen a lot of times that a weak argument by your judgement is a strong one by the mock test keys. What you perceive as definitely false turns out to be definitely true. Or what was a sure shot wrong usage of grammar as per you turns out to be the only correct option. Now one week isn't exactly an ideal timespan to actually improve your verbal skills. But yes, you can analyze your mocks for mistakes where you lacked the idea of a particular grammatical usage, or couldn't connect the central theme of the paragraph to the proposed argument, or maybe couldn't judge whether some information was directly given in the paragraph or was merely implied. If such revision saves you 5 mistakes in the exam hall, the revision has served its purpose nicely.
4) Mental calculations: Just pickup a few calculative DI sets, and try to arrive at the answers mentally. In the paper, you will encounter many DI questions where mental calculations or smart guess-works are absolutely essential. Many a time, you need to find a bare minimum value for an option so that you can eliminate the option values lesser than it. Sometimes you will need to know how much four successive growths could affect a value. Sometimes you will need to convert various values into similar numerator/denominator ratios so that you can arrange them in increasing/decreasing order. Touch upon all these little tricks which will boost your D-day scoring.
Signing off, I'd like to mention one important fact: The paper is not an insurmountable challenge. If it were to be, then we people at JBDON wouldn't be writing these articles. You too can make it to a top B-school!! So just focus yourself on these areas and do very calculated work in the last week. Write the paper with a very balanced mind, and emerge on top
!!All the very best!!