General funda on cat

Hi everyone,
I am Vikas Kumar, a final year undergraduate in computer science and engineering at IIT Kanpur. Well, this time I will write something useful. The journey from IITK to IIMA has been quite eventful. At times I felt everything was going down the drain and then suddenly I got all calls and eventually converted all my gd/pi calls.
Let's look at CAT. There are three sections. Now, I was good at Maths. So, I really did not prepare for it. I believe every IITian or a person with a good engg background should find this section quite easy. But, the trick is to make this section your strength. People go with the perception that one should be content with a score of 12-16 which will clear your cutoffs. But, at times it backfires. In cat2004, I believe maths was more scoring than english. I scored 36.66 which will give you a rough idea of how scoring this section can be. A good maths score will be 22+ while one will be reasonably safe if one scores 14+ in cat2004. I believe in CAT 2004, 20-22 would have fetched 99 percentile in maths. Coming to DI, CAT2004 was a real surprise. The pattern in DI is gradually tilting towards logic from problems involving data crunching. But, in no way does this mean that you should not concentrate on usual table/graph problems. CAT 2004 was an exception. Otherwise, I think DI can be the make or break section for people who believe they cant score very well in the other two sections. The key to success in DI is PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE...... Now, the most critical section I believe is english. For IITians and engineer, this is a real problem. But, believe me you can improve tremendously in this section. The key to scoring well in this section is the realization that you don't need to speak or write very good english. Half of the paper is RC. For people who are underconfident, this is the best bet for increasing their score in english. Read atleast 2 novels a week 3-4 months before CAT. Read editorials of HINDU very regularly. Apart from your RC needs, it will come very handy in GD/PI stage later. Do the above exercise for 2-3 months. Mug up word power by norman lewis. It definitely helps if you dont have good vocab. If you can score something close to 15+ marks out of 25 in RC, you are well on your way to an IIM call. Now, the english usage section consist of 25 marks. It consist of around 6-8 marks of parajumbles. I believe parajumbles can be solved with a very high level of accuracy if you realize the funda of solving it. Start looking for connects, contrast and flow of the statements. Even names of persons and places can be a vital clue to the solution. This again requires common sense and the ability to analyse and interpret the sentences. For parajumbles, again I will advise all of you to practice regularly. Even if you get the answers correct look at the solution and realize what made you choose this option. This is really an important exercise. Ideally, analysis of the solution should take as much time as you take to solve the exercise on your own. Then comes fill in the blanks which again I believe can be quite scoring. If you know the meaning of the options, you are done. But, even if you dont know the meaning of the options, try to understand the meaning of the sentence and its flow. Is it looking for some contrasting words or is it looking for some similar words? In most of the cases, you will easily eliminate atleast 2 options. If you are not very much sure between the two, you can always take an educated guess !!! Now, we come to grammar questions. Grammar problems are not easy for people with ok english. If you have been a voracious reader, can understand the nuances of english grammar etc. then this may well be quite scoring and can be solved quite quickly. But, for me it always proved to be a stumbling block. The problem is that in CAT the grammar problems that usually come are not standard errors that you get to spot in CL/TIME/IMS mocks. I will recommend not to put too much emphasis on these sections if you are fairly ok with the other types of questions.
Let me know if you want some more fundas on any type of questions in these sections in particular. Just put in your comments and I will edit the post. Since, I have written this blog quite fast, please ignore my usage/spelling mistakes. I have never been good in english.
Vikas