Learning Methodology for CAT

The language section of the CAT tests a candidate’s proficiency levels in English. The test aim mainly to assess the candidate’s ability in the usage of words in different contexts and the candidate’s comprehension of words.

You can adopt short term and long term strategies to improve your scores in the verbal ability and reading comprehensive section. Notwithstanding the strategy you adopt, important is to remember that your ability to read and comprehend English depends on your efficiency in the language at various levels. Thus, in order to improve your scores, it is imperative that you assess yourselves and improve in different levels.

Word level, sentence level (viz multiple words) paragraph level (multiple sentences) and passage level (multiple paragraphs are the three levels that the aptitude exams like the CAT, test a candidate’s proficiency at each level. This apart these tests aim to assess your expertise at the chapter level (multiple passages) and book level focusing on how you can maximize your word power in the CAT. So, increasing your word power is the key. How do we do it?

The CAT and other management entrance exams in India lays more emphasis on candidate’s functional knowledge of words rather than his / her ability to memories words by rote learning (something that is still required for exams like the GRE). Here are some of the methods by which you can improve your comprehension of words. Self assessment to know your current level through reading of news papers and books of various kinds – fictions to technology oriented and subject books. Any newspaper or magazine article is written for the average reader. Hence, if you are unable to comprehend such an article, it indicates that your vocabulary is below par. So make a note of the number of words you fail to understand in an article of say 1000 words.

While doing this, there might be two types of words you will struggle to understand:

Words that you don’t know but can understand the meaning of, which are in the context of the passage.

Words that you are unfamiliar with and that prove as a hurdle to your comprehension of the passage.

The number of words in both the above mentioned categories would give you an indication of the level of your vocabulary. A person with good skills in language would be able to go through a 1000-1500 word passage, while encountering a maximum of nine words that are not understandable to him / her.

A newspaper like The Times of India, Hindu, and Indian Express would be the perfect to start with for this exercise. In fact, if you conduct an analysis of the CAT and other management aptitude exams, and evaluate the kind of words they required students to be familiar with over the last few years, you would realize that there is actually no world that you might miss out on, if you comprehensively and dedicatedly read a papers for a period of six to 12 months.

Note down the words and memorize their meanings – not through the dictionary definitions, but by attaching a visual value to each word.

It might also be a good idea to look up the thesaurus and group words with similar meanings so that you can memorize multiple words through one word.

Perform this exercise until you reach a point where the number of unknown words, in every 1000-1500 word article, comes down to a single digit number.

Lastly, part from words, you should also look at developing your knowledge of English by going through idioms, phrases and phrasal verbs. Refer to a good dictionary or a list of phrasal verbs, which you could download from the internet, for the purpose.