Not really, and if you ask the status at various coaching centers around the city, students are now more concerned about their strategies and fundamentals for the CAT than if they will be holding the pencil or the mouse in their hands while writing it. It is the season of mock CATs and city heads of coaching centers across the city say that whether pencil or mouse, it’s still the fundamentals that reign supreme.

According to Nand Kumar, City Head, Career Launcher (CL), Dadar, students are taking one complete test and three sectional tests in a week. The classes are going on too and students now divide their time between both of them. At IMS Learning Resources, apart from taking mock tests, students are more in the preparatory mode and are smoothing out the rough edges of the various topics they will be tested on the final day. They are almost done too; rather they should be done as the Open SIM CAT, which is the IMS mock CAT open test for all students (irrespective of them being IMS students or not) is scheduled for Sunday, July 26, 2009. At T.I.M.E again, almost 90 percent students are taking mock cats although no one has stopped going to classes. Most of the tests are online; while CL has scrapped all of its paper pencil tests, IMS and T.I.M.E has a combination of 60-40 percent and 70-30 percent of online and paper-pencil.

Strategies always fail you on the test day when CAT comes with a pattern and a structure which no one thought about before. However, students devise it always too since it always is good to be armored for a battle (or is it war?). At CL, a detailed analysis is given to the students after every mock test, so that they can check out where they went wrong. Class room analysis and one to one mentoring is also provided. This helps a students find out his weak areas and as there are still more than four months to go for the C-day, work on them too. T.I.M.E and IMS follow more or less the same technique. According to Satyes, Center Head IMS every student is different, hence they help devise strategies according to the needs of an individual student. One thing that can be very dangerous to students at this time will be copying some one else’s strategy. What works for Ram does not work for Shyam!

So you think everything is the same and CAT going online is not to be paid much heed to? If you say no, you sure have forgotten the Reading Comprehension (RC) exercise. How do you plan to highlight an important point in the RC so that you may refer it while answering questions? There is a tip given to me by Kumar:

You divide the page into nine grids (by drawing two parallel horizontal and vertical lines on it). Number them from one to nine and now highlight the grid (or make little notes in it) where you think your paragraph on the computer screen will fall.

It can be helpful once you get used to it. Do you think you have more such tips to tackle CAT? Give them as comments or discuss them on the forums. It will be interesting!