Two Mocks, Two Days Apart
On 29 July I sat PreSimCAT 02 and scored 96, my best mock to that point, driven by a 50 in QUANT. On 30 July, one day later, I sat SIMCAT 107 and scored 40, with 2 marks in DILR. Nothing about my knowledge changed overnight. My own analysis note from that mock, written the same week, says: "Could have definitely gotten 30 marks." The sets were doable - I picked wrong, committed to the wrong one early, and had no time left when I realised. That gap is not a knowledge gap. It's a time-management failure, and it's the single clearest example in my own mock history of why in-exam time management is a distinct skill from knowing the content.
CAT gives 40 minutes per section with no ability to borrow time from one section for another. That single constraint is why a candidate who can solve every DILR set given unlimited time can still score 2 marks in the section, the way I did.
VARC: The Reading-vs-Answering Trade-off
With ~24 questions in 40 minutes, that's under 100 seconds per question on average - but RC and Verbal Ability questions don't take equal time. My working allocation:
- Read each RC passage in 3-4 minutes, actively noting structure and main idea as I go rather than re-reading afterward.
- Answer RC questions in 1-1.5 minutes each once the passage is read - most answers are findable quickly if the first read was active.
- Para-jumbles and para-summary get 1.5-2 minutes each - these don't reward over-analysis; my first strong instinct after checking logical flow is usually right.
My costliest VARC mistakes have all looked the same: 6-plus minutes on a single hard RC passage. If a passage isn't yielding after the first pass, I answer what I can and move on - I can return if time permits, but a stuck passage should never eat into Verbal Ability time.
DILR: Set Selection Is the Time-Management Skill
With 4-5 sets in 40 minutes, the entire game is picking which sets to attempt, not solving every one - which is exactly the skill that failed me on 30 July. I now spend the first 3-4 minutes of the section skimming all sets and rating each easy/medium/hard based on how quickly the constraints make sense, then attempt in that order regardless of position in the paper.
I hold a hard cap of 12-14 minutes per set. If I'm past that without meaningful progress, I abandon it - a half-finished hard set costs the time I'd need for an easier set I haven't touched yet. On SIMCAT 107, I didn't hold that cap, and 2 marks in DILR was the result. My DILR practice strategy guide covers how I've tried to build the judgment to rate sets accurately under pressure, which only comes from timed practice - not from reading about it.
Quant: Triage Before You Solve
With ~22 questions in 40 minutes, roughly 100 seconds per question - but Quant question difficulty within a paper varies more than VARC or DILR. I do a first pass through the entire section in 3-4 minutes, marking questions as immediately solvable, needs-work, or skip, and solve the immediately-solvable ones first to bank easy marks before harder questions eat the clock.
A specific trap: some Quant questions look simple but need a long calculation chain. If I'm three steps into a solution and it's not converging, that's a signal to abandon, not push through - sunk-cost thinking here has cost me more marks than any content gap. Quant is also the section where deliberate practice actually shows up in my numbers: my average rose from 26.8 across my first five mocks to 35.6 across my last five (full log in my mock writeup), which is exactly the section where calculation-speed technique and mental math drilling reduce how often I hit this trap in the first place.
The 10-Minute Checkpoint Habit
In every section, I check the clock at the 10-minute mark and again at 25 minutes. At 10 minutes I should have made a first pass through most of the section (VARC: skimmed passage structures; DILR: rated all sets; Quant: triaged all questions). At 25 minutes I should be attempting second-tier difficulty questions, with the last 10-15 minutes reserved for review and any remaining easy marks. On SIMCAT 107 I never hit the 10-minute checkpoint in DILR - I was still fully inside the wrong set. That's the mechanism behind the 40, in one sentence.
Why I Practice Against a Visible Countdown, Not the Exam Software's Clock
One habit that changed how reliably I hit the 10- and 25-minute checkpoints: practicing sectionals with a countdown timer visible the entire time, rather than glancing occasionally at wherever the mock platform tucks its clock. Glancing occasionally is what happened on SIMCAT 107 - by the time I checked, I was already well past where the 10-minute checkpoint should have caught the stuck DILR set. A timer that's always in view turns "check the time" from a decision I have to remember into something I see without looking for it, which matters most exactly when I'm absorbed enough in one set to forget the checkpoint entirely.
Why This Has to Be Practiced, Not Just Read
None of the above worked the first time I tried it, and it clearly still fails under pressure - the 30 July mock is proof. Time-management instincts - how long a "stuck" feeling should be tolerated, how fast I can rate a DILR set's difficulty - are built through dozens of timed sectional mocks, not by reading a strategy article once. I use every sectional mock specifically to rehearse the checkpoint habit above, and review afterward whether I actually hit my 10- and 25-minute targets, not just what my final score was.
Karma Yogi lets me log sectional mocks separately from full mocks and tag them by section, so I can see whether the checkpoint discipline is actually improving mock over mock - not just the raw score, which is exactly what hid the DILR problem for two months in the first place. Log your next sectional free.
End of essay
- Anish Guruvelli