CAT VARC Preparation Insights

Before I ventured into teaching VARC for CAT, I studied Pharmacokinetics where I learnt that in order to bring about a drastic change in the rate of a pharmaceutical process, we must alter the step that dictates the phenomenon the most. Trying to manipulate a step which has little significance would barely bring any perceptible change. Same, my friends, is true for your CAT preparation!! You are at, say, 70 percentile and wish to jump to 99+. How do you think you are going to make that big a jump? There are topics and subtopics in each of the three sections, but are all of them equally critical? If not then which are the ones on which your performance in the exam broadly rests? A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. So let us look at some data to see the distribution of 34 VARC questions across different broad question categories - Reading Comprehension (RC), Critical Reasoning (CR), Grammar and Vocabulary, in that order.

(CAT '20 had 26 Qs in VARC instead of the usual 34 in the preceding 6 yrs as the total duration of the exam and consequently individual section were reduced due to COVID.)
CAT '21 had 24 Qs in VARC.

As is evident, the areas that have clearly dominated the VARC section of CAT in recent years are RC and CR. One may accuse me of being selective in considering only previous 10 years’ data, but the reasons for that are:

1. Recent trend has to be a parameter of relevance. I am sure that while preparing for your end-semester exams, you pick the end-semester papers of previous 4-5 years as your cornerstone, and do not worry about what was asked 20 years back.
2. There has been remarkable consistency in the number of questions asked in CAT (100 in 3 hour test and 66 in 2 hour test) and in the individual sections (34 in VARC in 1 hour section and 24 in VARC in 40 minute) in the last 10 years, before which it is hard to find such consistency and thus difficult to observe any clear pattern.

Understanding the CAT VA & RC Focus

One may also point out that I am focusing on only one exam wherein there is a multitude of other tests that do have quite a few, or perhaps a lot of, questions from Grammar and vocabulary sub-sections. Understand that CAT is the mother of all MBA entrance exams you would appear for, for no other exam acts as a gateway to so many and such illustrious colleges, including the elite IIMs. There is a reason the name of most of your study groups on Whatsapp and Telegram is CAT preparation and not MBA entrances preparation!

I discuss at length in my classes why CR, and especially RC, remain such darlings of CAT and the cornerstone for any test that wishes to ascertain your rationality; however, I will steer clear of that discussion here for the want of time. The point is VA in CAT, in the present context, is all about RC and CR. If I further break down CR, we see that almost all the questions asked under this broad category in recent years are from 3 topics - Summary, Parajumbles and Out of Context. While the first two are known old devils that have been appearing in CAT since always, Out of Context is a recent, somewhat unique (and cryptic) addition. I may choose to write about this question type some other night if I so feel like, and that, I am sure, will ruffle a few feathers here and there 😏

So that brings us back to what we started with. Is what we are focusing on as important as much as we are focusing? Are we sure we are not fixated on certain areas because we are good at them or because we find them interesting? You can be the stud who knows almost every word in the newspaper, but what would you do with that vocabulary if there are no questions where it is tested? Grammar could well be made out to be almost half the syllabus in terms of volume, but what’s the point of your spending so much time and effort on it if you will barely get any questions that require any understanding of grammar? Also, I hope we are not avoiding proportionate effort in some areas owing to the amount of labour it would take there or because it requires us to do things beyond our comfort zone. You know which area I am alluding to 😝

Think. Reflect. ADAPT.

With my 15 years of experience of teaching VA for CAT, and having scored over 99 percentile in VA section on many occasions, if there is one thing that I can say is sure to catalyse your accuracy and improve your comprehension in RC and most of CR questions (all in CAT), it is READING DIVERSE GENRES. Whenever you read CAT RC passages (RCs), the single biggest factor that governs your comprehension of that passage is your familiarity with the field/genre to which that RC belongs. Understand that CAT makers do not write these passages themselves. These passages are basically excerpts taken from articles posted on internationally renowned magazines and websites such as time.com, nytimes.com, theguardian.com international etc. So whoever writes these articles, does so for the readers of these websites and magazines. And like any other article, these belong to a particular genre and thus find place in the relevant section of the magazine or newspaper before they are picked up by someone to be turned into an RC.

Now when we read or watch anything, we go for something of our choice — a young college girl might like to read a fashion magazine, a sports fan would pick up Sportstar or watch sports channel, my political enthusiast father would prefer the front page of the newspaper and watch political debates, I would confine myself to The Economic Times or maybe Bigg Boss, a male engineer would rather watch….well, let’s not go there 🙈. You have got the larger point anyway. We all read what matches our interest which naturally makes what we read interesting for us, and are thus easily comprehensible.

But imagine if one day you pick up something that belongs to an area totally unfamiliar to you. Imagine a person who has never had the inkling of the farthest of particle of philosophy is given to read the works of the great Jacques Derrida or Friedrich Nietzsche!! (if you think just their names are complex, you have no idea what’s in store for you when you read their work :D). And that is what happens to you when you read RCs, basically articles, that lie outside the area of your interest. Why does that happen? Simple.

So what should you, as rational and informed people, do so that you do not end up fretting when you face RCs in CAT and before that in the exhaustive series which we, at Aarambh, have planned for you? You must develop familiarity with all (or as many as possible) different genres. Read the previous sentence thrice. You must read diverse articles from varied fields so that there remains no genre that you are alien to. While that may seem like a punishment in the beginning, the rewards it would reap you in the long run would be rich!

If you think reading is an excruciating pain, you have a choice — face this pain either during the preparation or in the exam! There is a well-known saying in army academies across the world — the more you sweat during the training, the less you bleed in the war.

Also, know that it is only a matter of time and habit before you develop curiosity in areas beyond your realm of interest, and then it would be a smooth sail after which RCs would not seem as frightening as they might now do. But that would take persistent and conscious effort to step out of your comfort zone and read what you have never read.

How to implement this?

To implement the above, I strongly suggest the following:

1. Read one novel every week.
   It goes without saying that each novel should be from a genre that you have hitherto been unintroduced to. I generally share a list of authors and novels and also give some genre-wise suggestions in my classes. You would find that in the next post.
2. Read the front page and editorial section of The Hindu newspaper.
   Add Oped/Opinion (right next to editorial) to this after a month of beginning. Front page contains the news of national and international importance, adding substantially to your knowledge repository. All this awareness about current affairs would come handy when you participate in Group Discussions (GD), Personal Interviews (PI), Extempore etc., all of which comprise the second stage of preparation.
   
   Editorial is one page in the newspaper (usually page number 10 in The Hindu) which has articles from diverse fields. If you are game for it, do read the Oped page, which is the immediate next page to the editorial. And for God’s sake stop reading ToI. ToI to newspapers is what AajTak is to news channels and what fight sequences in South Indian movies are to fights in reality.
3. Read 1-2 articles every alternate day from aeon.co.
   The website comprises carefully selected, highly informative and diverse articles with CAT-level difficulty. In fact, CAT itself has picked 6 of its RCs in the last 5 years from this website! More importantly, choose articles from the genres that you are not comfortable with. You may start with articles that you find interesting to build some momentum, but eventually you need to go to articles that are unknown to you. Know that there is a search icon at the top corner where you can enter the name of the genre (philosophy, economy, art, culture, metaphysics etc) you wish to read articles from.

PS: You need not begin with all 3 of the above simultaneously. Start with 2 (The Hindu)