How Vitrag Kothari Aced VARC and Scored 99.35 Percentile in CAT 2024?

How I Aced my Strongest Section VARC: Vitrag Kothari

So when I first looked at the CAT syllabus and saw the Verbal section, I felt reassured. I remember saying to myself, almost dismissively, "At least VARC won't be a problem." It was comforting to think that, amidst all the algebra, geometry, and DI sets, there would be one section that would feel familiar, one place where I could breathe.

But the exam has a strange way of humbling you when you least expect it.

The first CAT mock test I ever took stripped away that sense of comfort entirely. When I checked my score, the number almost felt unreal, a single digit, barely 8 or 9. I had not done well.

That one result hit harder than any Quant or DILR setback ever could, because it challenged the one belief I was sure about that I was good at reading.

I remember closing the laptop that day and sitting quietly for a long time. I wasn't angry, just unsettled. Somewhere in my mind, I could feel a shift happening. I realised that reading for leisure and reading for performance were two entirely different skills. CAT doesn't reward people who love words; it rewards people who understand patterns of reasoning. It doesn't care about how many books you've read; it tests how well you can stay accurate under pressure, how precisely you can interpret what the author intends, and how quickly you can tell the difference between an almost-right answer and the truly correct one.

That gap between how I thought I read and how I needed to read became my first significant discovery.

In the days that followed, I decided to rebuild my approach from scratch. I stopped assuming VARC would be easy and started treating it with the same seriousness I gave for the CAT Quant Section The first thing I did was set a routine. I made a promise to myself that every single day, without fail, I would solve at least four reading comprehension sets, not for fun, not passively, but like drills. It became my non-negotiable rule: four VARCs a day, every day, before going to bed, no matter what.

The first few weeks of CAT preparation were rough. Reading passages for analysis instead of curiosity was exhausting. The questions often felt deliberately confusing. I was accustomed to lingering over words, appreciating language; suddenly, I had to learn to skim, structure, and make decisions. But slowly, I began to notice minor improvements. My accuracy started inching upward, and I could sense myself becoming more aware while reading, noting tone shifts, anticipating question types, and seeing patterns in wrong options.

At the same time, I added another daily habit: twenty critical-reasoning questions. I had discovered that CR, though more common in GMAT preparation, was a brilliant training ground for CAT RCs. It forced me to think about logic, about how arguments are constructed and where they can fall apart. These questions honed my elimination skills, which, I would later realise, are the most critical weapon in VARC.

By combining those four RCs and twenty CRs every day, I began to develop both breadth and precision. The improvement was not immediate, but it was undeniable. I could become more aware of how examiners framed their traps.

Still, my early mocks continued to be unpredictable. One test would go brilliantly, and the next would collapse without warning. The inconsistency was maddening. I remember one mock in particular where I spent nearly ten minutes stuck on a philosophy passage that made no sense until I reread it twice. I panicked, rushed the remaining questions, and finished the section knowing I had done poorly. My accuracy that day was barely 40 percent.

That mock was another reminder: in CAT, how you manage time and emotion matters as much as how you manage comprehension.

So I began to focus not just on reading, but on the CAT preparation strategy.

I started timing every set. I learned that spending nine minutes on a dense RC was acceptable only if the accuracy justified it. I learned to let go of passages that didn't click within the first minute of reading. I realised that it was better to solve three RCs with near-perfect accuracy than four with guesses. The more I analysed, the more I discovered that VARC success comes from restraint, not aggression.

During CAT preparation time every CAT mock became an experiment. I tried different combinations of two RCs and all VA, three RCs and half VA, skipping the hardest RC first, attempting it last until I found the rhythm that worked for me. Eventually, I discovered that I performed best when I treated the section as a sequence of short battles rather than a single war: one passage at a time, one clean attempt at a time, with no emotional carryover from the previous set.

To monitor progress during my CAT preparation , I started maintaining an error log, my most valuable possession during preparation. In that log, I noted the date, the test name, and the type of mistake. If I misread a tone, I wrote "tone confusion"; if I eliminated the correct option by overthinking, I wrote "over-analysis"; reviewing that log every Sunday became my ritual. Seeing patterns in my own mistakes was oddly reassuring. It reminded me that improvement was measurable, maybe not in percentiles, but in awareness.

Over the months in CAT preparation, that log told the story of my growth. Early pages were filled with "misread question" and "ignored option D." I was evolving from a casual reader into a more focused one.

But even as my skills improved through the times in CAT preparation, my confidence often wavered. Some mocks went so well that I started believing I had finally "cracked" the VARC solving strategy, only for the next one to bring me crashing down. The emotional volatility was worse than the academic challenge. I realised that the section tested not just comprehension, but composure.

To stabilize myself, I began to include ten minutes of quiet breathing before every CAT mock test, a small meditation routine I picked up from a friend who practised yoga. I would close my eyes, inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, and hold again. Those few minutes taught me to quiet the noise inside my head. Over time, it became second nature: whenever I felt panic creeping in during a mock, I instinctively slowed my breathing. That habit probably saved me dozens of marks across tests.

The lowest point in my journey came about a week before the actual exam. I took what was supposed to be my final "benchmark" mock, one that would simulate exam conditions perfectly. I was confident going in, but the paper was unusually tough. The RCs were abstract, the VA felt strange, and midway through, I lost focus. When the results came out, my VARC percentile was in the 50s. I felt gutted.

That evening, I remember walking outside to clear my head. I questioned everything, my process, my timing, even whether I had overestimated my abilities. But after a few hours, something inside me clicked. I told myself, "If this had to happen, better now than on the real day." That perspective shift was liberating. Two days later, I took another mock and scored in the 99.8th percentile. That single turnaround taught me one of the most valuable lessons of all: consistency is not the absence of bad days, it's the ability to recover from them quickly.

As the months passed in CAT preparation, VARC stopped feeling like a mystery. It started feeling like a craft something I could refine, measure, and control.

Around the final month, I decided to align my practice time with my actual exam slot. My CAT slot was scheduled for the morning, so I began practising VARC every day at that exact time. It sounds like a minor adjustment, but it made a big difference. My brain became conditioned to perform at that hour. Each day felt like a simulation of the real thing.

During these sessions, I noticed that comprehension fatigue often set in after about 30 minutes. To counter that, I built mini-breaks into my study flow, two minutes of stretching or simply looking away from the screen after each RC. This helped me maintain concentration across the entire 40-minute section during mocks.

One of the most significant evolutions during this CAT preparation period was how I started reading like the examiner. I realised that every CAT passage has a hidden purpose. Some are built to test inference, some to test the understanding of tone, and some to check logical flow. Once I started identifying that intent, the entire section began to make sense. I stopped being reactive and became proactive.

I developed a habit of summarising each paragraph mentally in a single sentence: "This introduces the idea," "This provides evidence," "This rebuts the earlier claim." Those mental bookmarks meant I rarely had to reread long paragraphs. The structure of the passage stayed clear in my head, and I could locate information almost instantly when answering questions.

Another quiet but powerful change was how I handled the options. Early on, I used to jump at the one that "sounded right." But over time, I learned that the correct answer in CAT rarely sounds right; it simply fits. The most tempting options are usually those that add a little extra logic or emotion, something not present in the passage, but appealing to our instincts. I trained myself to distrust anything that felt too satisfying.

By now, I had also started observing how my moods affected my results during CAT preparation time. If I entered a mock thinking "I have to score well today," I made more mistakes. But when I treated it as just another practice session, I was calm and accurate. So I began repeating a small affirmation before every mock: Focus on process, not percentile. It became my internal mantra.

As the final few days arrived, I entered what I called my "refinement phase." There was nothing new to learn, only to polish. I had a small notebook of "VARC traps" that I read before every mock: extreme-word options, tone mismatches, paraphrased distortions, and attractive irrelevancies. I knew my enemy well by then.

I also changed my mock schedule. Instead of taking one mock a week, I started taking one every two days, always in the same environment, same time slot, same pattern. I wanted my brain to associate that rhythm with performance. Each mock ended with a long session of analysis — sometimes longer than the test itself.

The night before the actual exam, I didn't open a single CAT resource. I had done everything I could before the CAT exam day. Instead, I focused on resting and maintaining calm. I remember lying in bed thinking about that first mock months ago, the one where I had scored in single digits and smiling. The journey from there to here had changed me far beyond academics.

When I woke up on exam day, I was surprisingly calm. I followed the same morning routine: light breakfast, quiet breathing, no last-minute revision. I kept telling myself that the CAT was just another practice test. By the time I entered the exam hall, I wasn't nervous. I was ready.

When I woke up on the morning of CAT 2024, the world outside felt unusually quiet. The air carried that odd mixture of nervous electricity and calm that only big days bring. I remember lying in bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling, feeling my heartbeat settle into rhythm with my breath. Months of preparation, thousands of questions, hundreds of mock analyses, everything had led to this one day. And yet, I didn't feel fear. I felt a strange steadiness, the kind that comes only when you have already fought all your battles in advance.

I went through my routine mechanically but mindfully: a light breakfast, a few minutes of box breathing, a check of my admit card and ID. My mind kept repeating a quiet sentence I had trained myself to use before every mock: Trust the process. I had learned long ago that last-minute revision is a false comfort. The brain cannot learn new tricks on the day of the show; it can only perform the ones it has rehearsed.

As I walked toward the exam centre, sunlight spilled across the road in that familiar late-November warmth. I noticed tiny details, the rustle of admit cards in other students' hands, the small, nervous smiles exchanged by people who had never met before but were bound by the same test. I smiled back. We were all opponents and companions at once.

Inside the hall, time slowed. The invigilator's voice announcing the rules felt distant. When the system asked for the password to begin, I placed my fingers on the keyboard and exhaled. For a brief moment, I remembered that first mock months ago, the humiliation of that single-digit score. I smiled. That version of me would have been terrified right now. The present version was ready.

The screen blinked: Section 1 VARC. Forty minutes. Twenty-four questions. No second chances.

As I began reading, the noise of the hall vanished. The sentences flowed smoothly, and the author's tone was neutral, slightly analytical. I summarised each paragraph in my head, almost unconsciously, introduction, example, critique, and conclusion.

One by one, the questions came and went. My finger hovered over each option, not with anxiety but with calm curiosity. I eliminated, compared, and justified. The right options almost revealed themselves when I stopped forcing them. When the final question of that passage flashed green, I felt a quiet surge of gratitude, not joy, not relief, just the satisfaction of seeing months of training manifest cleanly.

When the exam finally ended and we were asked to leave, I walked out slowly, deliberately, as if I wanted to memorise that corridor, that feeling, that moment when months of effort turned into lived experience. Outside the gate, people were already analysing the paper, comparing questions, debating difficulty levels. I listened for a while and then drifted away from the crowd.

I didn't want numbers just yet. I wanted silence.

That evening, I didn't open social media. I didn't talk about cut-offs or percentiles. I cooked myself a simple dinner and sat by the window, watching the city lights. My mind replayed the exam like a film: the passages, the calmness, the breathing, the quiet confidence. For once, there was no self-criticism, only gratitude.

I thought about how this one section, which had started as my most significant shock, had become my biggest source of stability. VARC had been the place where I learned to manage chaos, not through control but through trust. Trust in my preparation, trust in my ability to stay calm, trust in the idea that consistency outweighs talent.

The waiting period for results stretched for weeks, and every aspirant knows how slow those days feel. At first, I tried to distract myself with movies, reading, and long walks. But every few days, the thought crept in: What if it wasn't enough? Then another voice countered: You did your best. That is enough.

Around that time, I revisited my old error log. The notebook's pages were worn, corners curled, ink smudged. I flipped through them, as if revisiting an old diary. Early entries were filled with frustration "careless," "guessed," "overthought." Later ones read differently "maintain calm," "trust instinct," "good elimination." It felt like reading a story of evolution written in my own handwriting. I realised that even if the result turned out average, the growth was undeniable.

Yet, hope remained. I wanted validation, not because I needed a number to define me, but because I wanted proof that discipline works.

When the results finally arrived, the moment felt oddly anticlimactic. I had imagined drama, hands shaking, heart racing. Instead, there was a quiet curiosity as I logged in. The portal took its time loading, as if teasing. Then, there it was.

Overall CAT score: 104.

VARC score: 35.

For a second, I just stared. Then I smiled not wide, not triumphant, but deep. There it was, tangible evidence of all those early mornings, late nights, messy error logs, failed mocks, and steady recoveries.

The funny thing is, I wasn't even surprised. I had already felt that satisfaction weeks ago when I walked out of the exam hall knowing I had kept my composure. The number was only confirmation of what I already knew; I had grown.

That morning, I called my mom. She was thrilled, of course, her voice bursting with pride.

Over the next few days, messages started coming from friends congratulating me, asking for tips, and juniors wanting strategic advice. I responded honestly. I told you that there is no trick, no single book or shortcut. What works is boring consistency. Four RCs a day, twenty CRs, reflection, repetition. They looked for secrets. I offered patience. Some understood, some didn't.

I thought about writing all this down, not to teach but to remember. Because memory fades, and I didn't want to forget what it felt like to rebuild faith in myself one paragraph at a time.

As days turned into weeks, I found myself turning to reading again but differently. I returned to novels, essays, and long-form journalism, not preparation, but as a pleasure. The act of reading had regained its innocence. After months of dissecting sentences for tone and inference, it felt liberating to read without a timer, to lose myself in a story again.

And yet, something inside had changed forever. I could no longer read passively. Even while reading a magazine article, I would catch myself identifying the author's central idea, predicting the conclusion, and noticing tone shifts. CAT had rewired how I processed information. It had turned me into an active, analytical, but still curious reader.

That change, I realised, was the best gift the author had given me.