Majority of CAT aspirants are just like you. They are college students or recent graduates with 1-2 years of work-ex. Most aspirants pursue CAT prep alongside their college or work. This is a sensible decision, especially if you have more than 4-5 months at hand.
The trick then is to be able to balance the requirements of your CAT Prep with the obligations at your college/workplace. A good way to see your CAT prep from now till November end, when the CAT is typically scheduled, is to see it as the number of weeks left and have a weekly plan in place that allows you to balance your CAT Preparation with your other engagements.
Having seen 1000s of students just like you crack it, I can tell you that CAT is more a test of skills rather than knowledge.
How you think about problems, simplify them, make use of options by either selecting the right one or eliminating the wrong ones and get to the right answer in as less time as possible – all these are skills that one needs to develop. Given that, as with any other skill such as painting, acting, sports or music, you get better with regular practice and not with sporadic bursts of effort. Two hours a day would work so much better than 14 hours on one single day of the week would. Skills are like muscles – regular, routine effort is what it takes to build them. And this regular work can happen alongside your college or job.
A thorough CAT preparation would require around 800-1000 hours, depending upon your starting point – your strengths and weaknesses. Usually, one-third of this is spent in CAT coaching for those of you who do opt for the discipline and guidance of formal, professional coaching. Apart from learning the various topics, covering of syllabus, use of shortcuts, developing lateral thinking, motivation, test-taking and strategic inputs to maximize your scores, the best coaching classes for CAT should also ensure that you know how to make the best use of the remaining two-thirds of the time that you need to use largely on your own.
For this two-thirds, or roughly around 600-650 hours, it is imperative that you have:
A weekly plan that ensures the discipline that skill-building needs
A knowledge of your stronger/weaker areas that ensures optimum investment of time
The time-tested, super-powerful ADAPTIVE homework plan for each student at MBAGuru ensures that you get the maximum bang for each minute you put into your CAT Prep, and this is what makes it arguably the best online CAT Preparation Course or the most powerful offline CAT Prep available, depending upon the mode you prefer.
Will take up a recommended weekly-plan in detail in one of the next articles.
About the author: Deekshant has sleep-walked through several 100 and 99.9 %iles in practically every section of the CAT. That he is a cricket fan and he writes okay is evident from most of his posts. 1000s of our students swear that he can motivate almost anyone to double his/her percentile through very simple yet powerful inputs. And that’s why every MBAGuru student has direct access to him via mail and Telegram. Oddly, he somehow also finds the time to write songs professionally. And yes … almost missed this … he is an alumnus of IIT Delhi & IIM Cal 
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