It is one’s exposure to the kind of questions seen in the Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning (DILR) section of the Common Admission Test (CAT) that will determine the marks that one can score in this section, in particular, and in the CAT, in general.

This approach to problem-solving is not exclusive to any particular field of study. Whether students come from backgrounds like Math, Engineering, Humanities or any other discipline, they can all benefit from this exposure.

It is the practice that one puts into the types of questions in this area that will prepare the mind to solve a set that was not seen earlier — the learnings from prior exposure could help in cracking the set.

Unlike Quant where there is more or less a specific area to study from, the questions in the section can be new, invariably compelling the student to spend valuable time on them, increasing the difficulty level of the section. This is why students often feel that this section is tough.

Therefore, greater exposure will lead to better chances of performing well in this section.

Prepare in this way
Working out problems from the study material booklets is the best way to prepare for the different varieties of questions that appear in CAT. Puzzle books like those by Shakuntala Devi, George Summers and so on provide exposure to high-level logic puzzles and the approaches to tackle them.

It is essential to practice as many sets as one can so that the approaches for different kinds of sets are well entrenched in one’s mind.

Questions come from...
Considering the recent CATs, the questions for this section have broadly come from areas like caselets, graphs (scatter plot/bar graph), puzzles, quant-based reasoning and so on.

Other popular areas like deductions and logical connectives, coding-decoding and so on are seen not in the CAT but in other management entrance exams like Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP)/Common Management Admission Test (CMAT)/Management Aptitude Test (MAT) and so on.