CAT 2015 – General Thoughts, attempts, percentiles

Now that we are out of the immediate aftermath of the exam (and after the weather gods in Chennai have given us a breather to head to office), it is probably a good time to have a look at how the paper went

Paper was slightly tougher than last year, with DI-LR being substantially tougher 
Verbal and Quant were broadly at the same level of difficulty as was seen last year, but DI-LR was substantially tougher. A good student could attempt ~30 questions in verbal, ~24-ish in Quant, but only about ~14-15 in DI-LR. In the past few years, the variance in difficulty levels across sections had fallen, but this time it was stark. I personally do not think this was by design. Our dear test-setters probably wanted to crank up difficulty in order to offset the advantage given by having a calculator and ended up overcompensating.

So, what would be the percentile for xx number of attempts.
To begin with, percentile guessing is a mugs game. Further, accuracy is a critically important, and unavailable datapoint for doing this exercise. Still, we all like to pretend that we can forecast stuff with reasonable accuracy, so here goes. Remember the caveats.

Verbal ability

~24 attempts – 90^th percentile

~26 attempts – 94^th percentile

~28 attempts – 98^th percentile

~30 attempts – 99^th percentile

~31 attempts – 99.4 percentile

Anything higher – Higher percentile

Accuracy matters for all three sections, but is particularly critical for verbal. With this type of paper, almost anyone could have attempted 25 questions. Attempting 31 questions and getting 30 correct will be dramatically better than attempting 32 and getting 5 wrong. There were not too many questions with a ‘catch’. So, small details will matter a lot in this section.

DI-LR

~12 attempts – 90^th percentile

~14 attempts – 94^th percentile

~17 attempts – 98^th percentile

~20 attempts – 99^th percentile

~23 attempts – 99.4 percentile

Anything higher – Higher percentile

This might turn out to be the section where there is a huge gradient in the attempt vs. percentile chart. For instance, someone with 13 attempts and all correct might end with 93^rd percentile, while a student with 13 attempts and 3 incorrect could get buried at 60^th percentile.

Quantitative ability

~18 attempts – 90^th percentile

~21 attempts – 94^th percentile

~24 attempts – 98^th percentile

~26 attempts – 99^th percentile

~28 attempts – 99.4 percentile

Anything higher – Higher percentile

This probably falls bang in between Verbal and DI-LR

Overall

~52 attempts – 90^th percentile

~57 attempts – 94^th percentile

~64 attempts – 98^th percentile

~69 attempts – 99^th percentile

~74 attempts – 99.4 percentile

Anything higher – Higher percentile

Remember, that all of these are just guesses. And all of these are predicated on the fact that accuracy is at very decent levels (maximum of 2 questions wrong in each section). I do not really understand the phrase “around 70%” accuracy. Around 70% accuracy is just management-speak for 60% of so accuracy, which is just humbug. Weather forecasters do a better job than that.

So, how does this change preparation for CAT 2016?
Nothing much needs to change. Prepare from the basics, work a lot on the drill, take gazillion mocks in the run-up to the exam – this mantra worked for CAT in 1990, 2000, 2010 and will work for 2016 also. 

The second clear inference is this – Take the 2IIM online preparation course. We have taken the horse to the pond, demonstrated how one drinks water and exhorted the horse to drink water. We still continue to improve the product as well. It is already way better than any classroom course. God knows how good it will be in 8 months’ time. From CAT 2017 onwards, a third of the guys will be preparing online. ‘Discovering’ a good online course will be like saying Indian cricket team plays well on turning tracks. Duh. 2016 is the year where you can be savvy and get yourself an advantage. J

Apologies on this slightly-delayed post. We guys at 2IIM operate out of Chennai, and Chennai has just begun crawling out from under the rocks. But 2IIM, like the rest of Chennai, is back on its feet, and we will be there to help you guys with the interviews in 3 short weeks. Best wishes for CAT results. 

What to do the day before CAT?

The simple answer to this is 'Nothing'. The more elaborate answer is "Nothing much". But since I cannot pass off two words as an article, I am going to do the MBA-thing. Say lot of words that convey the same point.

Dont let lack of sleep get to you.
Everyone is going to tell you that you should sleep a lot the day before the exam. But if you have prepared with any amount of intensity, you will find falling asleep tough. Acknowledge that. Keep in mind that the adrenaline on the day of the exam will drown out any fatigue from sleep-deprivation. If you can get 8 hours of the good stuff, great. But if you manage only 4 hours of it, the worst thing to do is to go into the exam beating yourself about this "mere 4 hours". 4 hours is more than enough. Sachin Tendulkar has slept less than that and scored centuries the next day. Going into a critical exam, it is likely that you are too switched on and cannot sleep that easily. Dont worry about this.

Do something that you enjoy, but do not overdo it
Watch a movie, play football, watch youtube videos of Lionel Messi, take a nice ride/drive. Do whatever it is that puts you at ease, but dont do this 2 am.

Get the small details right
Fuel your vehicle, check the hall ticket, verify if the photograph is the same, set aside your favourite pen etc.

Dont fret about preparation, now is not the time to regret the long weekend you took to goof off
However well you might have prepared, give your best shot with that. Do not go in feeling that you are under-cooked. The last day is to gee yourself up, so focus all your attention on conning yourself into believing.

Fly off the blocks, let adrenaline do its thing
In the minutes before the exam, bin all thoughts of percentiles, formulae, strategy, cut-offs and other nonsense. Simplify. Think what Usain Bolt would be thinking before  a 100m dash. He might have prepared his entire adult life for the race. But on the eve of the race, he is going to operate with a simple framework "Hear starting gun, run for 10 seconds". Solving questions is the best way to relax yourself. The least you can do is give yourself a chance.

Remember, this is not such a big deal.
Anyone who does well in the exam has to be reasonably sharp; while the converse is not true. This exam is but one outlet to showcase your mettle. Nothing more, nothing less.

Best wishes from the entire 2IIM team for CAT 2015. 

CAT Preparation - What do teachers expect from students?

As a teacher, I meet gazillion students every year, and am often amazed at how confident they are now compared to how we guys were 15 years ago. Having said that, going hand in hand with this confidence is a feeling of entitlement that is as puzzling as it is unwarranted. Students these days believe things have to be laid out for them on a platter and that they have to be "inspired" and "guided" to do even the bare minimum.

During this time, we have also seen reams and reams in print on how the education system should change to help students. In all this while, I think we have not clearly articulated what the students are expected to do. Ergo, this post.

Do the drill. 
This "replace hard work with smart work" management-speak has taken students to a point where they do not appreciate the old-fashioned drill. Doing 150 questions on quadratic equations creates links in your brain that are worth their weight in gold when you are practicing for a competitive exam. It is not just the speed that you gain, it is the role played by the automaticity that is priceless. You save energy on the regular stuff and this blesses you with more bandwidth for the trickier bits.

I hate to be this old man narrating his experiences, but I think my experience might be relevant here. A group of my friends and I were preparing for CAT in 2000. We had all cleared JEE barely three years before that (back when JEE was a tough exam) and dealt with Fourier and Laplace transformations as part of our course curriculum. A bunch of the guys had done well in assorted Olympiads and as a group, we were ultra comfortable with math,

Largely because our seniors had given us some material for CAT preparation, we started with some speed-test book. We started with percentages and within 5-6 questions realized that the material was largely BS packaged as genius content (a tactic still followed by the industry) . We still powered through and did all 50 questions in that topic and knocked off topic by topic over the next 2 weeks, practically just for the heck of it. The material did not really push us, but we gave it a go chiefly for the sake of "completion". Now, 15 years later, if you ask me to find 42% of 707, I would think of it as slightly less than 3/7th of the number and guess in the ball park of 300. All because I did gazillion questions rather unscientifically 15 years ago.

Powering through is very instructive. Do not underestimate this. I hate it when students say they get "tired" after doing 4 sets of Data Interpretation. That is just nonsense. The idea of finishing something off, solving ALL possible questions, etc have become old-fashioned notions. Getting questions under the belt can change the dynamic in unforeseen ways.

Retain humility (for some students this should read as "acquire humility")
A simple requirement for learning anything new is to have some humility towards what you are learning. These days I see some students get so cocky by the time they reach level of difficulty of 7 that the brain shuts down for levels of difficulty 8, 9 and 10. Respecting the content also might enable to get some joie de vivre during the preparation process. This again is vital for competitive exams; else the pressure will drag you down.

My colleague, K.S. Baskar has been training students for nearly 20 years and took his CAT nearly 25 years ago. If you handed an interesting question to him today that left him stumped, it would immediately put a smile on his face. Purely out of the joy of having learnt something new. Its a shame that many students do not even get to see this feeling of joy.

Note that I asked for students to respect the content, and not necessarily the teacher. Contrary to popular perception, teachers do not yearn for gratitude or thirst for approval from students. If you learn well and have a great learning attitude most teachers wont care whether you are grateful to them. Or whether you hold them in high esteem.

Dont fret about the imponderables
I am going to start this bit with a personal warning. The next student who asks me "I have scored 75% in 10th, 62% in 12th standard and 65% in undergraduation, what are my chances of getting into IIM-A?" risks serious physical injury.

To get into IIMA is incredibly difficult. Someone who has been mediocre throughout has even less chance than someone who has been exceptional so far. So, if you have a middling record, your chances are low. It is understandable that you think you are way more capable than what your past record suggests. It is also unlikely that IIMA will share this blinkered view. The simplest and most fool-proof way to bring them around is to get a good CAT score. So, work on that.

So, if your track record is sad, you should have a simple rule - Start waffling after getting a decent CAT score.

I had a rather unremarkable CGPA in my undergraduation. Unremarkable enough for me to fret about admissions into the IIMs. I felt so apologetic about this that I avoided mentioning this. I was so afraid of defending my poor record that I dreaded going to the interviews because of this. These days, students talk about a poor record as if they had nothing to do with it.

The poor marks in 10th standard and 12th standard are because you goofed off. Not because of anything else. Dont expect someone to say "You are good in spite of this". You might be. If you want the world  to believe it, prove it.

Dont sit around waiting for a great preparation plan, or worse, for inspiration.
Before you think about having a grand preparation plan that is a ten-step ride through to IIM-dom, actually consider some preparation. Print the following statement and stick it on your bedroom

"An hour of preparation is worth 12 hours of preparation planning". 

Too many students waffle about having a grand plan and start dreaming too early about going places. If half the time spent on early-stage planning were replaced with actual preparation, it would be brilliant. You should not require someone to say "There is a genius waiting inside you" to solve 25 questions in algebra.

And lastly, own your preparation.
Have a simple preparation plan, and execute this well. Do not outsource your preparation entirely. See where you stand periodically, and set ambitious targets for the amount of effort you put in. The result will follow (it always does).

I realize that I risk coming off as a cantankerous old man hankering after good-ol' times. If it were not already clear, we teachers do not really care that much about what students think of us. I think I speak for all teachers when I say "We are here to put hajaar fight for you. But as the old saying goes, one can only take the horse to the pond."

CAT 2014 - General Thoughts

Now that we are out of the immediate percentile-predictor mode of CAT 2014, it is probably a good time to gather our thoughts on CAT 2014.

Paper has definitely become easier 
This is one of the few unambiguous inferences that can be drawn. In 170 minutes, someone who has prepared decently well can reasonably hope to attempt 50+ questions . It has become easier across the board, but probably the drop in difficulty level in math is sharper. DI and LR have also become easier, primarily because now solving a grid gives you a shot at getting 4 answers correct, instead of the 3 in previous avatars of CAT. In some sense, CAT is reverting to the type of papers we used to have in the 1995-2004 era. Lots of questions in the easy-to-moderate range and very few tough ones.

So, how does this change preparation?
One needs to focus slightly more on speed. For cracking CAT in the years 2009 to 2013, speed was not critical. If you had the right fundaes, but were not this manic-intensive test-taker, you could still hope to crack 99th percentile. The questions pushed you conceptually; and staying on top of fundamentals was more important than cranking up the speed. However, with number of questions going up and level of difficulty coming down, the student who can do the routine questions quicker has an advantage.

Any question has two components - i) cracking the funda and ii) doing the solving part. In CAT 2009-2013, the former was more critical. In CAT 2014, the latter is more important. There were a great many "regular" questions, for which one need not have even paused for thought. How well you have done the "drill" will matter.

Math-geek advantage reduces?
If you can crack the regular ones quickly, you will be able to easily find 25 questions in Quant. You can happily skip the 5-6 "tough" ones that only the geniuses can get. Given that very few are going to have time to attempt more than ~35 questions in Quant, now a well-practiced certified non-genius can compete with the math geeks and even hit up to 35 questions.

Why have the IIMs done this?
God knows. They have not deigned to share their thought process with the unwashed. Till last year, they thought that having 60 tough questions over 140 minutes was good; this year they have decided that 100 simpler questions over 170 minutes is better. And this was probably instituted because the person in charge of CAT this year has a niece who said 170 is her favourite number, and between tough and easy, she likes easy.

The IIMs are clearly entitled to choose the process they believe is best. We have absolutely no say in that. But it is a shame that they do not believe they have a duty to communicate the thought-process behind these changes.

Contrast this with how international exams treat their students. The GMAT changed its pattern about 2 years ago (when they introduced a new Integrated Reasoning section). They gave a bunch of sample questions to practice, tested out a bunch of questions, explained why this was being introduced and started this process a good 2 years before they instituted the change.

Contrast this with beloved CAT's communication which broadly went like "This year new format, student-friendly. You are all lucky you have us. "

What about the other player, TCS?
TCS brought its version of we-dont-really-care to the table. The instructions were vague (and in different fonts). The practice exam on the website had a bunch of screen-capture shots. Some questions had 4 choices and some had 5.

The worst was on display on the day of the exam. In the center that I went to, only one person had complete knowledge about the processes. The rest 7-8 were muppets just making up the numbers. They had a high-handed attitude to boot as well. In their college, these jokers run semester exams and lord it over their students. For CAT, they should take the role of service-providers, or hosts. They did nothing of that sort. The invigilators who were present chatted throughout the exam, they kept opening and closing the doors and windows randomly. One had to cajole an additional sheet out of them. And apparently these issues were seen across centers in different cities.

In the case of both Prometric and TCS, the exams are being conducted at some other premises, and not their own. But we got the feeling that Prometric owned the exam and drilled in some basic processes into the college invigilators. TCS seems to have taken a more laisse-faire approach to the whole do.

When will we get a Harvard at Bangalore, or Wharton in Chennai?
As an alumnus from IIMB, I have had a soft-corner for the IIMs and have held them in high regard. Now, with every passing year, the IIMs have started behaving in increasingly heavy-handed fashion. They do not care about communicating their admission processes clearly or in articulating the reasons behind the different processes they have.

The IIMs have built their reputations almost entirely on a monopoly of talent - of both students and faculty. They have not lived in an era where they have had to compete for either. I cannot wait for the day when foreign institutes set up campuses in India and take away this monopoly from the IIMs.



 

CAT 2014 - Attempts and Percentiles

Let us list and bust a few of the myths regarding CAT attempts and percentiles

1. Number of attempts and percentiles have a strong correlation
This is of course true. But the correlation is extremely overstated. Every year, there are lots and lots of students who attempt 65% of the total questions and end up with less than 85th percentile. The far deeper correlation is likely to be between accuracy and percentile. The number of attempts is merely the most visible metric and therefore the most discussed. Unfortunately, quite a few students chase magic attempts numbers and end up shooting themselves in the foot. Come results date, we will hear a lot of students cribbing that the scoring, normalization, etc were incorrect.

In CAT 2013, a few of our students secured more than 90th percentile in a section having attempted only ~8 questions in the section. If you had read any of the forums, you would believe that guys who attempted less than 15 in a section should basically throw in the towel.

2. All students have 85% accuracy
The only thing the attempts and percentiles tell us is that there are a LOT of people who have accuracy rate of less than 50%. They get more than half the questions wrong. The CAT is a high quality exam. Pausing for thought and worrying about detail pays off in this exam. Guys who have cracked this exam will tell you that being in a frenzy never helps.

3. If you have attempted less than 65 questions in CAT 2014 you have no chance
At least half the students who are going to join IIM ABC are going to be guys who attempted less than 60 questions. The vast majority of guys who attempt 65+ questions are going to end up with less than 95th percentile. There are lots of students who appear for CAT every year, attempt lots of questions, and consistently get between 85th and 90th percentile. Its a shame that they do not change their strategy.

So, where does this leave us.
If you have attempted fewer questions but are sure about most of them. the score might surprise you to the upside.

As far as percentiles go, I would guess that they would be in the following range
Overall attempts ~ 40  - ~90th percentile
Overall attempts ~ 45  - ~94th percentile
Overall attempts ~ 50  - ~98th percentile
Overall attempts ~ 55  - ~99th percentile
Overall attempts ~ 60  - ~99.4 percentile
Overall attempts ~ 65  - ~99.7 percentile
Overall attempts ~ 70  - ~99.9 percentile
Overall attempts ~ 75  - Higher than this

Two caveats
1. These are at-best informed guesses. At worst, they are random numbers in a sequence.
2. All of these numbers are based on the assumption that at worst 2-3 questions are wrong. I do not understand the term "around 70% accuracy". Any paper where you believe you will have around 70% accuracy, you are basically leaving to the machinations of fate. If you think around 3 out of every 10 could be wrong, then very easily 5 out of 10 could be wrong.

Note that the density of scores is usually very low right at the top. Between 100th percentile and 99th percentile, the difference in number of attempts (correct answers) will be around 20 (perhaps even more). It is fairly crowded in the 90th-98th percentile range. With the same number of attempts, 4-5 more correct answers might determine the difference between a middling 89th percentile and sure-fire 96th percentile. This is why we ask students to take gazillion mock CATs and fine-tune everything.

Those students still waiting to take the exam, the one suggestion I would make strongly is to not get carried away by all the attempts numbers you are hearing. An enormous number of students live for the kick of saying that they attempted a lot of questions on D-day. A great proportion of this "huge number of attempts" gang end up having attempted 10 questions too many for their own good.

CAT GMAT XAT SNAP IIFT NMAT etc

There  are so many of these entrance exams that it is all very overwhelming. So, let us see if we can get some clarity out of these.

As far as India is concerned, the biggest fish is CAT
Give or take 90 out of the top 100 select based on CAT, with quite of a few of these selecting based only on CAT. This includes the IIMs (13 of these, soon to be 18), IITs, SP Jain, FMS, Bajaj, NITIE, MDI, IMT, among a great many others

For international MBAs, it is GMAT
Almost all universities in the US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Europe select based on GMAT. In India ISB and Great Lakes select based on GMAT. All the IIMs (+ MDI, XLRI etc) use the GMAT score for admissions into their executive MBA programs.

CAT or GMAT, which one should I take?
There are two simple rules
1. If you want to do in India, take CAT. If you want to go abroad, take GMAT.
2. If you are a fresher, take CAT. If you have more than 8 years of experience, give preference to GMAT

If you have 2-4 years of experience, and not sure whether you want to do MBA in India or abroad, then the decision is even simpler. Take both.

What about XAT?
There are around 30 decent colleges that select based on XAT. Within this, probably XLRI is the only college that selects only through XAT. Almost everyone else accepts CAT also (XIMB, LIBA GIM etc)

The big two are CAT and GMAT really, XAT is important because it can give you a second option.

What about these other exams?
Now, IIFT selects based on a separate exam. Symbiosis uses SNAP, NMIMS has NMAT. These three give you access to narrow groups of colleges, so write these based on whether you like that particular college. There is a government-mandated CMAT and then MAT. Of these, CMAT is more or less useless. MAT is accepted in a lot of private colleges, but there is practically no college that accepts MAT that will not give you a seat based on a good CAT score. If you are confident of getting 90th percentile in CAT, then skip MAT.

What about the quality of the exam?
CAT is of a good quality (note high quality, not difficulty). The quality of the GMAT exam is even better. Now, what do I mean by quality? The questions are challenging but not impossible, the level of difficulty is consistent, the framework is well defined and the exam is generally well conducted. Among the others, IIFT and NMAT are alright, at least they care enough to set decent papers.

The really worst papers are XAT and SNAP. XAT papers usually carry errors and have wild variances in difficulty across sections. SNAP also do not care much about the way they set their papers. Symbiosis probably thinks it is a good idea to sell some applications and create some excitement around the college name. SNAP has been accused of even picking some questions from freely available sources on the web.

The following chart should give an idea about all these exams, their level of difficulty, their quality (subjective opinion, bear this in mind) and how many people take these exams.

Note that the bubble size broadly outlines how many prepare for these exams

So, how does one prepare for all of these?
Prepare for CAT, forget all other Indian exams. If you are taking any of the other Indian exams, all you will need to do is make are a few some adjustments that shouldn't take more than 3-4 days. Focus slightly more on XAT; because even though the paper is inconsistent XAT can open more doors than most of the other exams.

Plan for GMAT separately. Since it is an American exam, you will need to make some adjustments regarding what is more vital. GMAT tests concepts better, and de-emphasizes computation. GMAT verbal is also tougher than that of CAT. So, even though more than 75% of the syllabus is common across CAT and GMAT, a few adjustments need to be made.

How CAT, XAT and GMAT are different, syllabus-wise.

Explaining the abbreviations used in the diagram
FIJ - Fact, Inference Judgement. Even CAT Seems to be phasing this out. You should see a maximum of 1-2 questions from this in the exam.
SE - Sentence Elimination
LR - Logical Reasoning (puzzle)
WU - Word Usage
TC - Text Completion (Fill in the blanks)
PC - Paragraph Completion
DI - Data Interpretation
Trig - Trigonometry
BDM - Business Decision Making
RC - Reading Comprehension
AWA - Analytical Writing Assessment
IR - Integrated Reasoning
CR - Critical Reasoning
SC - Sentence Correction
GK - General Knowledge
P&C - Permutation and Combination.

Note that this is a broadly indicative chart. Kindly do more research on your own after keeping this as a starting point. Dont get all officious about it if I have missed some topic or category.

CAT Preparation - Handling Pressure

CAT is a high pressure exam for many, and how to cope is probably a key determinant for cracking this exam. For a lucky few there is no great pressure and this is just another exam to have a go at. If you are one of that brigade, you should probably even skip this article and stay in that carefree bubble. No point thinking and reading about pressure and panic, and planting seeds into the brain.

Quite a few students freeze during the exam, a select few even entertain thoughts of not taking the exam at all. And a great many become slightly fearful and lose some of the 'josh' that needs to be present.

I am not an expert at handling pressure and am not going to give much by the way of prescription here. I want to showcase three well-written  articles on pressure - well, two on pressure and one on 'josh'.

As one of the pieces states "We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail."

All three are based on sports and are wonderful articles to help us understand what pressure does to people. Sportsmen need to do their bit in the presence of gazillions and which is why their chokes always provide us the backdrop for us to understand pressure.

The Art of Failure - Gladwell.com

This wonderful piece focuses on Jana Novotna's implosion at Wimbleson. Quite a long piece but totally worth reading. The author distinguishes between choking and panicking, and from a student perspective, choking is probably a bigger threat than panicking in CAT.

Some interesting extracts are given below - But I would recommend that you read the entire piece.

She was crumbling under pressure, but exactly why was as baffling to her as it was to all those looking on. Isn’t pressure supposed to bring out the best in us? We try harder. We concentrate harder. We get a boost of adrenaline. We care more about how well we perform. So what was happening to her?....

Panic, in this sense, is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct.....

Given below is the probably the most important insight. "I hope I dont mess this up" -  is not a good mindset to take into an exam.

What is it we tell underperforming athletes and students? The same thing we tell novice pilots or scuba divers: to work harder, to buckle down, to take the tests of their ability more seriously. But Steele says that when you look at the way black or female students perform under stereotype threat you don’t see the wild guessing of a panicked test taker. “What you tend to see is carefulness and second-guessing,” he explains. “When you go and interview them, you have the sense that when they are in the stereotype-threat condition they say to themselves, ‘Look, I’m going to be careful here. I’m not going to mess things up.’ Then, after having decided to take that strategy, they calm down and go through the test. But that’s not the way to succeed on a standardized test. The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. They think they did well, and they are trying to do well. But they are not.”......

They failed because they were good at what they did: only those who care about how well they perform ever feel the pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure–to work harder and take the test more seriously–would only make their problems worse..... (Dear students, take 3 days off if you are continuously agonizing about the exam).

That is a hard lesson to grasp, but harder still is the fact that choking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the situation in which the performance occurs........ (Go in to have fun with the paper. Dont worry about letting down your Dad)....

The second article is also interesting because it is a team sport and relates to cricket.

Why the Proteas Choke at the Cricket World Cup 

South Africa choked in the most important cricket match since their return to cricket in the 90's, the semi-final of the 1999 world cup.

Again, some simple extracts

It is obvious that Klusener was so locked into the idea of winning the match for South Africa that he was unable to step out of himself.....

What they needed when the scores were equal was clear-headedness and the presence of mind to coolly look at where they were and what had to be done......

The Haal Of Pakistan

Having seen two long articles on pressure, let us go through one on adrenaline. This is a fabulous article on the Pakistan cricket team from one of my favourite writers. This one is about 'josh' or 'haal' as the writer calls it. One should prepare to reach this level where the senses are heightened before the exam,

Again, some extracts

And then there is total frenzy, so overwhelming and real you can almost hold it in your hands. Such is its force that it can be deeply moving even through the sensory dilution and sanitisation of TV, even on ball-by-ball commentary online...

Fielders start hitting the stumps and taking catches which, in other situations, we can easily imagine them dropping.....

Please try to go into the exam by telling yourself this

“And it is a tamasha. I swear to God, we used to say it, we used to talk about it like this. Chal para kaam, chaloji, pakro [‘It’s begun, come, grab on to it’], that kind of language in the middle.”....

Suddenly, jaan aajati he......

“You could say denial if the outcome ended in failure; but here the outcome is success. Most times that self-belief is latent, but it gets triggered by some unexpected circumstance. And once triggered, it feeds on itself and explodes. I guess another way of seeing it is that this self-belief has an activation threshold, and once the threshold is met, there’s no stopping it and it goes all the way......

All three are long(-ish) articles, but interesting ones to understand pressure and josh. Before a critical exam, all of us have anxiety and adrenaline. Figure out ways to tone down one, and kick in the other. and that alone is worth 200 hours of preparation. Truth is, we do not really know how to do this. Otherwise, sportsmen with their infinite array of analysts would not choke. But, set aside some time to think about this.

Best wishes for CAT.