CAT exam preparation takes a lot of time. Aspirants usually prepare in a year by devoting 2-3 hours every day on an average over a period of 6 months. So, firstly, you’ll have to increase the number of hours because the days are less.
The below 100 days’ plan is according to an average person having a good hold on basics and looking to ace the exam.
The 100 days’ plan should be divided in 3 phases: Prep, Mock and Revise.
1) Prep Phase (65 days)
Assuming that you have the basic concepts of secondary school Maths and English clear and you are ready to dedicate ample amount of time and follow a plan religiously.
Before this phase, you should have a stock of material for practice. I would not recommend solving whole of Arun Sharma as the book being so vast, you won’t be able to solve it completely in 65 days. Materials of TIME, CL, IMS, Testfunda provide you many questions for practice. You can start solving one of the books from above.
I also believe that one should not only analyse the Mocks but also what you practice. Analysing your practice questions will help you to build a better plan structure for that topic/subject. Get a excel sheet made where you analyse what you practice with data points like Questions solved in the week, Average accuracy of a topic, your strengths and weakness, important formulae and tricks for easy calculation. Maintaining it is a task but you will surely reap the benefits at the Revise stage. This sheet will track your prep level.
You must be thinking that can it be automated? Answer is yes. Telling from my experience, I had a tough time maintaining this sheet. So I opted for online preparation. There is a website called PRAQTISE which made my experience of practice a lot easy with their adaptive pattern and various data points mentioned above that were provided after the end of a practice session. Analysis was just made easy for me.
On a particular day, start with Quants topic for minimum of 3 hours dedicated studying and end by practicing at least 4 sets of DI and LR. On the next day, start with a Verbal topic and end with 4 sets of DI and LR.
Pay attention to every question you solve, always give a thought on the possible questions which can be formed with the concept. By doing this, you will not only be able to solve the present question but also the other questions which are of similar nature. Make a note of important formulae that you come across while practising. The moment you start feeling monotonous, switch to the other section or get some break by involving in other activities which interests you.
Effectively you have 30 days for Quant and 30 days for Verbal and an overall 30 day overlap for DI & LR according to the above plan.
Verbal has majorly 5 topics: Reading Comprehension, Grammar, Vocabulary, Verbal Reasoning, Verbal Ability.
The latter 2 topics can be divided in subtopics.
For verbal, I recommend that practice questions from all sections in a Verbal studying session so that you stay in touch with every aspect of Verbal every time.
Quant has 5 topics: Numbers, Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry and Modern Maths. Effective number of days for each topic is 6.
In Quant, I would advise that you dedicate 5 days at a stretch on each topic and keep a day balance which you can utilise at the end of this prep phase where you go through the topic superficially via your bookmarked questions, formulae sheets.
DI/LR contains some typical question sets like Bar Graphs, Line Graphs, Arrangements but in CAT 2014 and CAT 2015, more focus was given on Reasoning based DI and LR questions.
Importantly, keep giving sectional tests every day so that you can adapt to test scenario.
2) Mock Phase (30 days)
As stated by many experts on online portals, minimum of 20 mocks should be given before actual CAT. Mock CAT means you try to recreate the CAT environment before the actual CAT.
Take a Mock every alternate day and analyse the mock on the same day.
Analyse your mocks till death as it will
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