Three days to go for CAT 2021. The clock is ticking faster and so is the anxiety of the candidates. Today’s article of our ongoing CAT series is about how to ace the Quantitative Aptitude section. Quantitative Aptitude is generally loved by those from an engineering background and is feared by others because it’s all about numbers. Pranav Pant, CAT mentor lists a few tips to ace it.

According to Mr. Pant, most of the topics asked in the QA section are those that can be solved in class ten too, so it is not considered too difficult a section.

Tips to ace the QA section:

1. Cover Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry well: These three are the main components of the examination. If you’ve covered these three well, you can easily say that at least 80% of the paper is covered. Arithmetic itself is around 40% of the paper. If you have even covered the basics of these topics, you should be able to solve a good number of questions.

2. Revise all the formulae in the last few days: You never know what they might ask in the examination. Going through formulae in the last few days would help you.

3. Attempt easy questions first: In this section, one good thing is all the questions are individual. There are no group questions. So you can easily pick a question and then decide whether it’s easy, difficult, or moderate. Attempt easy questions first, then moderate, and if time permits, go for difficult ones.

4. Use options to solve questions: In quant, the important trick that you were not taught in school as there were subjective answers is to use options. Here in CAT, you have objective questions and many have options. Using options can help you solve much faster.

5. Take relevant values of variables: In certain topics, relevant values make the difference. For example, if some question comes from the topic of percentage, you should take a variable instead of taking x, you can take 100x. For instance, the population of a town is a particular number and a particular number are males so you can consider the total population as 100x. So, relevant values help you solve questions in a faster way.

6. Don’t spend too much time on a question: You do not get marks for attempting the easy or difficult questions. All questions carry equal marks. So, don’t spend too much time on a question. If you find a question is difficult and you’re not heading anywhere after spending some time, just skip the question, go to the next one. Even if you skip a few questions consecutively, don’t get nervous, there are plenty of questions, and believe me, there will be some which will be easy ones and some moderate ones. So you can target those to maximize your score.

7. Don’t mark flukes in MCQs: Negative marking is very dangerous. If you just mark flukes, it’s less chance that you’ll score well in the examination.

8. Don’t leave non-MCQs unattempted: Try to solve it partially, then make some educated guesses and try to put in some values. There is no negative marking here. You can try flukes here.

(Pranav Pant, an MBA from FMS, Delhi University who has cracked several exams such as CDS, SBI PO, RBI Grade B, UPSC Prelims and teaches Quantitative Aptitude, Data Interpretation, and Logical Reasoning is hosting FPJ-CAT Tips series exclusive for FPJ readers. A 99.96 percentiler in CAT, Pranav Pant is all geared to drive exam blues away)