Issue 01 · 2026
The Karma Yogi Journal. Field notes for the long grind.
- Essays
- 94
- Exam tracks
- 5
- Topics
- 63
The Lead
The essay we keep coming back to.
The Archive
Everything else worth reading, ordered by date.
Page 5 / 10 · 93 entries
NEET Revision Schedule: What the Spacing Evidence Supports
Biology is 360 of NEET's 720 marks, and it is also the half of the paper the spaced-repetition literature actually studied. Here is what the evidence says about the gap between revision passes, where it locates an optimum, and the three places it stops being usable for a NEET aspirant.
How to Track Study Hours: A Method, and Its Real Limits
Log one row per session, at the moment it ends, with minutes that were measured rather than remembered. That much is worth doing. What tracking will not do is raise a score on its own - in my own log, elapsed prep time explains 14% of the variance in my mock results and my weakest section did not move at all.
Interleaving Quant Practice: 61% vs 38% in One RCT
A pre-registered randomised trial across 54 maths classes found mixed practice beat topic-wise practice 61% to 38% on a delayed test. My own log shows why that matters for CAT: the section I drilled topic-wise improved nine marks, and the section that needs selection improved two.
How Many CAT Mocks Should I Take? I Took 20 in 90 Days
The honest answer is 25 to 35 across a full cycle, and the count is the least important part of it. I took 20 in 90 days, seven of them within 48 hours of the previous one, and those seven taught me nothing at all.
How Many Hours a Day Should You Study for CAT? I Logged 335
My weekly goal was 1,260 minutes and my average active day is 149 minutes, which needs 8.5 days a week to hit. Here is the arithmetic that broke my own target, what 335 logged hours actually bought, and why the hours literature is far shakier than the 10,000-hour story suggests.
Error Log for CAT Mocks: Eight Categories, Seven Passes
An error log is one row per mistake classified by why it happened, not a list of question numbers. Here is the eight-category taxonomy, the row nobody logs, and how the log becomes the actual content of every revision pass from R1 to R7 - instead of redoing a paper you already know the answers to.
Exam Anxiety and Mock Scores: I Scored 96, Then 40
Two days apart, my best mock and my worst. The anxiety research explains less of that gap than you would expect - about 12% of variance at best - and the arithmetic of two outliers explains a lot more. What to check before you diagnose yourself.
Deliberate Practice for CAT: What 88 Studies Actually Say
The "quality beats quantity" claim has a real evidence base and a much smaller effect than the popular version admits: 12% of performance variance overall, 4% in education. Here is what survives contact with the meta-analysis, and what my own DILR log says about practising a section for three months and moving two marks.
CAT Study Plan for 3 Months vs 6 Months, Week by Week
CAT 2026 falls on 29 November, which makes a 13-week plan the one most people are actually running. Here are both timelines laid out week by week, the honest list of what compression costs you, and the one section that suffers most when you cut.
CAT Slot Normalization: How Raw Scores Become Percentiles
CAT runs three slots on exam day with different question sets, so a raw score means nothing until it is normalized against the people who sat the same slot. Here is why that step exists, how equating works in principle, and the plain fact that IIMs have never published the exact formula they use.
Colophon
Written between mocks. Edited between sits.
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