CAT Preparation -Quant section

How to prepare for CAT 2007?” While finding the answer to this question, I spoke with many trainers in the MBA coaching industry. All the answers that I got were on the same line, “number system ke liye 20 hr rakh lo, commercial math 15 hr mein ho jayegi, geometry ke liye 20 hr chahiye…” and so on. The answers were so general that they left me more confused. And every instructor had a different answer or study-time-frame suggestion for CAT 2007 preparation. Not only that, there was no method to break down study plan for students starting their preparations at different points of time. It made no sense that a student starting his preparation in May should be given the same advice as that given to the students starting in March. I realized that none of the instructors had a concrete idea about how to prepare for CAT in the best possible way. If I was a student, their answers would have left me completely befuddled.
Then I decided to go about it the Total Gadha way. I decided to let numbers tell me what to do. If it was common admission test I was preparing for, I should seek guidance from CAT papers themselves. I decided to find the numbers. When you have numbers on your side, you are unbeatable. I collected last 7 CAT papers and classified every question according to the topic. Then I summed up the number of questions in every topic and found the percentage occurrence of every topic. The result for CAT Quant is shown above (the classification is according to the number of marks):

Beautiful things, these numbers. I discovered that two topics- ‘Number System’ and ‘Geometry’- were solely covering nearly 50% of the CAT quant! Also, topics like ‘Simple Interest and Compound Interest’ did not occur at all and there were many topics such as ‘Profit and Loss’ which had become a bugaboo among students but which rarely occurred in CAT! Enlightenment, thy name is CAT!
(This article is taken from total gadha)