Let’s be honest. Every CAT coaching institute, worth its salt, has great materials, tests and also great teachers. The materials, teachers, tests, or strategies are commonly available resources to all aspirants. These resources, however, add value to only those who systematically use them.  Basically, for those who take accountability for their preparation and success.

A sure-shot way to create personal accountability is to have an ‘active mentor’ (not a passive mentor) as part of your CAT journey.

Active mentorship makes you accountable for your performance by continuous monitoring, mindset training, creating milestones, frequent reviews and co-creating solutions with an expert who knows CAT. Most significantly an ‘active mentor’ cannot handle more than 30/35 students in a year because of the amount of combined work that has to happen with each aspirant. Nothing happens in one session. It requires multiple sessions.

Passive mentorship does not make you accountable for your performance because you meet a passive mentor as per your need (when you face an issue). There is no monitoring, milestones or reviews, mostly because the passive mentor may not have enough time to spend more than a session with you. A passive mentor can have any number of students, because he can do mass sessions and videos with ‘tips’, ‘tricks’ and ‘motivational talks.’

To know how active mentorship can be a ‘gamechanger’ and bring out your highest potential in your CAT preparation, download the Pdf here.

Less than 20% of your time is spent in the classes. Your success in CAT will be determined by what you do in the remaining 80% of your time, when you are expected to work on your materials, take tests and analyse them. All this has to be done alone and that too systematically.

Most coaching institutes focus on the 20% and leave the remaining 80% for you to figure out. I think differently. I’m interested in the 80% as much as the 20%. The chances of success dramatically goes up when I get actively involved in planning, scheduling and monitoring the 80%. How do I do it?

1. Fortnightly one-on-one meetings: In these meeting study plans will be made for the upcoming fortnight and the previous fortnight’s performance will be reviewed. (click here to see a demo)
2. Classes: I would be taking all the classes. It will be a combination of recordings of live classes for the basics and live classes for advanced topics, previous CAT papers, MockCAT analysis, strategy demonstration sessions etc. ( some samples)
3. Practice area: About 20000 questions, 25 CAT Mocks, 40 Mocks of other exams (XAT, SNAP, NMAT, IIFT, TISS etc), 100 sectional tests. The 80% of your work happens here and that’s what I’ll monitor systematically.
4. Doubt clearing sessions: All doubt clearing sessions will be live with me and that too one-on-one. You book a slot, come in and get your doubts clarified. No group doubt clearing sessions. Only one-on-one sessions.
5. Mock Analysis Sessions: After every four mockCATs, we will analyse the mocks together (one-on-one session) to identify gaps in the preparation and strategy. Corrective measures will be part of the study plan.