Success Mantra for MBA Exams

The Right Attitude...

Your attitude makes an impact on things you do. It is also the key factor that marks the difference between success and failures. All your preparation may go for a toss if you don’t have the right attitude towards the things you do. Few of the things which will surely help you in your preparation are enlisted below:


Keep yourself motivated
Motivation is the driving force for most of our achievements in life. We need to have zeal towards our target and must have a “can do it” attitude for the same. Never let negative thoughts come in your mind. Try to avoid people who are discouraging and de-motivating. Nothing in life is impossible to achieve. You can reach all your dreams if you are determined and have a positive approach.

Be Focused
If you are really serious about doing MBA from any of the top institutions then you should be focused and striving hard towards your goal. Keep yourself reminding about your goal and you are surely going to achieve it with your perseverance. Divide your preparation in smaller parts, check your preparation periodically by attempting questions from the prepared areas and then analyze your results to find if your preparation going in right direction or not.

Mastering Time Management
Time management would is the key factor to your success. You need to use your time as efficiently as possible. Attempting the questions blindly like you used to do in your school or college won’t be helpful anymore. The key to getting ahead of others in such competitive exams is your ability to adapt yourself according to the situation. As soon as you get the question paper you can have the following approach:
1. Quickly Scan the questions
2. Mark the questions you feel you are comfortable with.
3. Select and solve the questions from the ones marked above depending on their difficulty and the amount of time they will take. The easier ones which will take least amount of time must be solved first and only then you should move to difficult ones.

Work on your Communication Skills
Clearing the written test is not the end of your preparation. You need to focus on the big picture i.e. pursuing MBA from a top institution. You surely have to see beyond that and keep your self prepared for group discussion and personal interviews. Every one has ideas in their mind but the most important thing is how well you convey all your ideas efficiently to the group or the interviewer.

Developing right Interests
Right interests will surely aid your preparation and help you in getting ahead of others without stressing yourself much. Many a skills will get developed naturally in you if your interests are right. Say for e.g. Reading books or articles on diversified topics will surely improve your reading speed. Even your achievements in your college extra curricular activities or any achievement in the organization you are working for will add value to your profile. Work on your communication skills by directly talking with people and try to remove any hesitations within yourself. Other helpful interests could be doing mental calculations, thinking creatively, having a mature opinion about things happening in the world.

Improve your Body Language
Body language is an indicator of your personality. A body language depicting confidence and maturity is the desired quality of a future manager. An interviewer closely monitors and evaluates you on the basis of your body language. A negative body language can also ruin the chances of an otherwise intelligent person.

Be Open to accept new ideas.
Keep yourself open for new ideas. Talk with other people and try to understand and analyze there views. Don’t have a vague and predetermined opinion in your mind about any thing. Try to understand the situation, analyze it and then conclude on it with the help of solid reasoning.

Read Diversely
Reading books or article on diverse topics surely helps in solving RC passages. This enriches your mind with awareness on diverse topic and also helps to improve your reading speed.

Practice a lot
Mock Tests should be utilized to develop skills such as time management, smart selection of questions and developing a flexible approach towards attempting the paper. Try to learn from mistakes in your Mock papers. Try to improve your approach towards solving the paper and you have to find out on your own what works best for you. Say for e.g. you should not attempt a RC passage in last 5 minutes of tour test. Also solving a lengthy Logical Reasoning question which requires lots of analysis in last 5 minutes is not suggested. Such things you need to find on your own as things work differently for different people depending on their strengths and weaknesses.

Also read:

• Strategy for those 2 critical exam hours
• CAT Guidelines for Beginners
• Recommended Books for MBA
• Must Read Novels & Books
• 500+ useful Maths shortcuts

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined."

How to plan your CAT preparation?

1. Find out your areas of improvement:
You need to introspect and find out where do you stand and what all resources you need to crack CAT. CAT could be broadly classified into following 4 areas:
1. Quantitative Aptitude
2. Logical Reasoning
3. Verbal Analysis and
4. Data Interpretation
Each of these area's have various topics from where questions are asked in CAT.
To start with you must find out which all areas you are conferrable with and which one are those where you need to improve on.You will have to start putting effort depending on the number. of areas of improvement. More the number of areas of improvement more preparation time is needed.


2. Need of Classroom Coaching, is it really needed?
Whether to join a coaching or not solely depends on a person's current level of expertise in verbal, maths and logical reasoning. To explain it better take example of Loans. To buy a car costing 1 Lac rupees how much loan one has to take totally depends on how much money he/she is currently owning. If a person is owning 1 lac then he doesn't need to take any loan :). Though one should definitely join Mock Tests. Continuing on the car example, Mock Tests are like learning driving before you buy a car ;).

Furthermore it totally depends on the discretion of candidate. If he feels he requires coaching in certain areas which he cannot improve by self preparation, he should join a coaching. But always remember one thing to crack the questions that comes in exams like CAT requires a good foundation which comes along with your schooling till 12th standard.
 

How to find out whether you need coaching for exams like CAT or not?
One simple way to find out this for those people who are going to attempt CAT for the first time in 2008 is by attempting free online mock CAT or attempting past year CAT papers. Attempt any of the two test papers of CAT from recent years. Do brush up your fundamentals before attempting any of these papers. When you attempt the past papers try to solve as many question as possible without putting any time constraints. If you are able to attempt around 25% of question correctly in each section then you don’t need to join any coaching.
You only need to work on time management & smart selection of questions. But if you score is less than 20% in all these sections then joining coaching would surely help you.

Click here to Take free Online Mock CAT
 
Click here to download Past Papers of CAT & other MBA exams 



3. Mock CATs, How helpfull are they?
Along with your expertise ,  the other most important thing to succeed in exams like CAT is to
a. Manage your time properly and
b. Smart selection of questions.
One can easily master these two things with abundant practice. Mock CATs are the best way to practice as it simulates a scenario which is similar to the real exam.
Mock CAT provides the exact CAT like platform which enables candidates to master the time management and cope of up with the pressure.


"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. "