2nd year BBA student weak at Maths: how should I prepare for CAT?

Before I begin, mere bachhe, I must say – you are on the right track. You have said two things which very few students have the maturity to understand - a) you want to finish your CAT preparation before you graduate, which is good, outstanding actually. That way you have enough time for revisions, working on your leftover weaknesses, mocks and many other things. You understand the value of this time and the risk of moving too slow. Good job. b) you would like to reappear after 2 years of work-ex if needed. Beautiful. You understand that in spite of all the hard-work it is possible that you might not achieve the desired score, in which case you don’t want to rush into another attempt in a hasty manner. You would like to build your profile (which you need to) and then appear again. You starting point is very grounded and realistic – no unrealistic aims of 99 percentile in 6 months, no overconfidence of thinking that CAT is easy. Good. Kindly remain so throughout your preparation and hopefully, you will reach great places dear. now.. let me address everything one by one, exactly how you have asked the questions beta.. 1.⁠ ⁠QA has a very definitive, standard path that works for most students - Step 1: Master calculations (tables, additions, subtraction, multiplication.. that’s it. No need of fancy vedic maths or some other techniques) Step 2: Basics of Numbers (HCF/LCM, and Surds & Indices.. no need to do bases or last digits or other complex things in number systems) Step 3: Basic Equation Creation (Word Problems, problems on ages and numbers… so that you develop comfort level with X and Y, and converting a language based question into a mathematic expression) Step 4: Arithmetic (Completely master everything) Step 5: Algebra Step 6: Everything else (it’s not even needed to be honest and is just bonus. I have seen students scoring 97-98 percentile without doing any of these things) So.. follow this roadmap. If you are very scared of Maths, you only need step 1 to 4 in the next 8-10 months. You can decide after that if you need step 5 at all, and you should definitely not do step 6. It will be an unnecessary wastage of time. 2.⁠ ⁠Coming to DILR, first of all understand that LR has nothing to do with Maths. DI is entirely dependent on Arithmetic but LR is pure logic. All the students I have taught who were great at LR has one thing in common - they all loved to play some strategic game, either chess or something else. So, just do that. Pickup a game that involves thinking and planning and strategic maneuvering and you will be good to go. 3.⁠ ⁠Well, if VARC interests you then first and foremost, that interest must be justified. People who make VARC their strength read books after books. I had a student once who used to read 30+ books every year and she scored so high in VARC that she converted 3 top private b-schools in spite of scoring 0 in QA and only 2 marks in LRDI. She is pursuing MBA-HR from TAPMI right now. So, if you are actually interested in VARC, you better have a mini library in your home by the end of your preparation. 4.⁠ ⁠There is no fixed timeline for this transitioning beta.. I have appeared for CAT thrice in my life and I have taken only one full-length mock ever. I have had so many students who scored 95, 97, 98, 99 percentile and took only 5-6 mocks in the whole year. But I have also known so many students who used more than 50 mocks (I don’t know why). My rule is - whenever you are able to solve CAT level questions in 2-3 minutes (in QA) with 90% accuracy, you can start mocks. Whenever you can solve a CAT level set or RC Passage in 10-12 minutes with 90% accuracy, start taking mocks. Before that, it’s just a wastage of time. And by when will you be able to achieve that is entirely dependent on how hard you work and how consistently you study. 🙂