CAT 2021 top scorer Sarthak Gupta has scored 100 percentile in VARC, 90.7 in DIRL and 99.4 percentile in QA. The overall CAT percentile of Sarthak Gupta is 99.93. While sharing his journey to success with us, he shared how he managed to balance his work and study and scored such good marks in the exam. As for the general tips, Sarthak repeatedly stresses the importance of time management, strategic study, and slow yet steady planning. 

Sarthak had also talked about the increasing the speed of answering the question is also very important. He had focused on continuous revision and solving as many questions as possible for QA preparation. For CAT 2022 candidates, his advice is that once you will complete your CAT syllabus then shift to solving mocks and start analyzing the improvement. Make an excel sheet/ test analysis notebook to note down your mistakes and areas of improvement. Read the article to learn from Sarthak Gupta’s experience. 

Interview of Sarthak Gupta: Scored 99.93 Percentile in CAT 2021

Ques: What were your CAT overall and section-wise score in the exam?

Ans: My CAT 2021 overall score was 99.93 percentile and the sectional score was:

• VARC - 100 percentile
• DILR - 90.7 percentile
• QA - 99.4 percentile

Ques: Since you are a working professional then how difficult was it for you to prepare for the CAT exam?

Ans. Devoting nearly 2 hours in the evening to CAT Preparation doesn't really put much stress on your work-life balance, but you must prepare a schedule and stick to it. Otherwise, the cascading effect of pending targets will start to affect either your preparation or worse your work.

Ques: When and why did you think of appearing for CAT?

Ans. Given that my dad is an IIM-K alumnus, who also ran a CAT coaching institute for 6 years, I knew I would give CAT eventually. I decided to give CAT a shot in 2020 to simply see how I would do. Thinking I would get ~95% even without prep, I was in for a rude surprise - I got 92.67%, and got a mere 60% in DILR.

• After this, I started working full-time with my father's educational setup in my hometown in both academic and administrative capacities. Along with this, I took up a freelance role with Cashfree Payments, Bangalore, as a Marketing Consultant, which exposed me to the world of fintech, digital marketing and marketing analytics.
• While I was good in some niche areas (content writing, data analysis), it quickly became clear that something that I'd need to learn more about was how campaigns are ideated, the benefits of addressing customer needs in your pitch, rather than simply creating target audiences (4Ps approach vs 4Cs approach).
• Meanwhile, at my full-time job, I was continually in leadership positions on a number of projects, regardless of their lifetime. While I usually was able to solve a few problems all by myself, working within teams became essential to get the job done.
• Given that my long-term goal is to gain experience before coming back home to take charge here, an MBA from the IIMs/top management schools became one of the better avenues to pursue my ambitions. All of these realizations motivated me to take management entrances much more seriously than I did before, and so, I began preparing for CAT 2021 in earnest in September yet again.

CAT 2021 Scorecard of Sarthak Gupta

Ques: Did you join any coaching institute? If yes then please tell us which one and why? If not - Why did you go for self-preparation?

Ans. I mostly self-prepared, but I augmented it with recorded courses from Career Launcher (VARC1000, DILR1000, QA1000). I wanted to control when and how I covered all the topics, which is why I did not go for live/online real-time classes.

Ques: What was your preparation strategy for Verbal?

Ans. This was the one section I knew I could score well in. Books had never failed to catch my attention; so, I did not need to make any significant efforts to increase my reading intake.

• For variety and spice in terms of vocabulary and content, I went through 1-2 articles/stories from many sources online (Forbes, HBR, Aeon, Medium, Patreon, even Fanfiction.net!) every week. It may seem like a low number, but, to make my reading practice truly effective, I read those articles/stories repeatedly. 
• From my previous experience in CAT 2020 and my initial mocks, I realized that I was a slow reader. This left me very little time to evaluate the options of the questions for an RC Passage, which inevitably lead to at least 4-6 wrong answers. To rectify this, I looked around, and found a wonderful gem by Justin Hammond on Speed Reading (on Kindle). The book had me unlearn a number of bad habits that I had. If you use Amazon Prime, you can read it for free; I highly recommend that you do so.
• Next, I saw that I got stuck between two options in about 6-7 RCs. Thankfully, the recorded course that I was using (VARC1000 by CL) had a series of videos dedicated to it, called "Option traps created by the question setter". This was immeasurably helpful to my RC strategy, and in the subsequent mocks, I started getting 13-14 questions right in my RCs.
• Coming to VA, the only questions I was good at were Para summaries. Para jumbles were a continuous pain that I actively avoided dealing with throughout my prep. However, as the final month rolled around, I finally tried to see what I could do about my strategy here. Coincidentally, this was when I was consistently getting 14+ questions correct in my RCs in the least amount of time, while leaving me with nearly 12 minutes (as compared to 7-8 minutes in the previous mocks) to get through the entire set of VA questions. 
• To my surprise, I found that all you really need to crack Para jumbles is time! My speed was slow with them, but at the end of 8 minutes, I knew I could get at least 2 questions out of 4-5 Para jumbles correct. The remaining 4 minutes were enough for me to be done with Para summaries.

Ques: What was your preparation strategy for DI and LR?

Ans. Honestly speaking, my DILR prep was a joke. All I did was solve sets during mocks, check the correct answers afterward, understand the solution, and move on to the next mock. I hated the section, and I still hate it now. To anyone reading this, if you want to learn how to be a DILR maestro, this is not where you will find any gems of wisdom.

Ques: What was your preparation strategy for Quantitative Aptitude?

Ans. Quant was where I put in some appreciable effort to gain speed in. I mainly focused on Arithmetic, Algebra and Geometry. These were the topics QA was mainly built upon, and this is where I tried to improve my score.

• First, I got my calculation speed up to snuff in Arithmetic. Next, I worked on revising all my elementary Algebra + Logarithms, and finished with some light geometry prep. 
• To reinforce my learnings, I solved and analyzed nearly 20 sectional tests of QA alone, simply for exposure and practice. 
• When CL's QA1000 recorded course came out in Late September, I used it to brush up on my concepts and solve a set of 5 excellent sectional tests. That was all I did for my QA prep.

Ques: How were the last few days before the exam?

Ans. Solved 0 questions in the last week. My work kept me quite busy, as I remember. Asked for a day off on the Saturday before CAT to give one final try to get my DILR scores across the cut-off range. Watched the BLAST Premier Fall Final (competitive Gaming in CS:GO) before sleeping at 10pm.

Ques: Which mocks helped you crack CAT?

Ans. I took 15 mocks from CL, along with 10 mocks from IMS (these 10 included all 3 CAT 2020 papers).

• In total, 25 mocks only. The key point was that I spent 3 days analyzing each mock and my performance in it. In DILR, I just checked if my score was close to 30% (which gives you ~90%ile in CAT).
• For VARC, I kept an Excel sheet that recorded my thoughts about a passage / VA question, and whether it was a good attempt or not.
• With QA, if I did not attempt a question, I went back to the chapter it was from to see what concept it needs to be solved.

Ques: One mistake which you think you should not have made either during the exam or during the preparation phase.

Ans. Should not have given up on DILR; I could have scored much better if I had been patient with my practice and my solving.

Ques: Please recreate the moment for us when you first saw your result.

Ans. After giving the exam, my expected scores were - VARC - 42, DILR - 12, QA - 49. OA - 103. I was supremely worried about my DILR score but decided to put it out of my mind until the response sheets came out. When the response sheets came out at 10 am on December 8, I immediately downloaded mine and started matching my responses manually to the correct ones.

• While going through my RC responses, the trend from my mocks was repeated again - 14/16 correct. When I went to the 8 VA questions, however, I rechecked my response sheet 3 times to see if what I saw was true - 8 CORRECT OUT OF 8. This put a big smile on my face, since I hadn't expected more than 4 corrections here. All the efforts I made to make my RCs strong had paid off in so many ways than I had even considered. VARC - Correct - 22, Wrong - 2 , Raw score - 64/72. I knew I was a strong contender for 100%ile in VARC.
• I went to DILR to see whether I'm getting across 85%ile. I was expecting a measly 12/60 and a ticket to damnation, but, surprise-surprise, got 19 instead. That meant I was going to qualify for the IIMs
• Coming to QA, my expectations turned out to be a bit higher than reality, but it wasn't too bad. QA - Correct - 14, Wrong - 4, Raw score - 40/66
• Total - 123/198 = 62.12%. From my mocks, I knew this score was easily 99.7+
• In the end, scaling worked massively in my favor, and my 123 was scaled up to 128.52, which gave me 99.93%ile !!

Ques: What next? Which colleges are you targeting based on your profile and percentile? And how do you plan to clear the GD-PI?

Ans. Given I have 1 year of work-ex with low undergrad marks, I'm realistically aiming for IIM-C and FMS. I'm preparing for GDPI from from a variety of sources; Career Launcher's PDP program, a group of BITS Pilani people who cracked CAT'21, guidance from my dad (who is from IIM-Kozhikode and used to run a CAT prep institute himself), and many others.

Ques: Which other exams did you appear for?

Ans. Other than CAT, I had also appeared for XAT.

Ques: What are your long-term goals and how do you think getting into your dream college will help you achieve that?

Ans. I wish to gain experience in the corporate world for some time (5-10 years), before going to pursue higher education in management to earn a PhD. After this, I plan to teach at a premier management institute for about 10 years before coming back home and taking charge of Prism, my father's institute in Utai.

Ques: What should be an ideal 6 months strategy to prepare for CAT?

Ans. You can work on covering the syllabus for QA and LRDI during June-August, while solving mocks at a very sedate pace (even 1 every 2 weeks is ok, as long as you stick to your commitment). Start reading a book from a field that interests you, along with good online articles/stories.

Quick Links:

• CAT 2021 Score vs Percentile
• CAT 2021 Cut off & Selection Process for IITs
• CAT 2021 IIMs Selection Process 2021