The MBA Exam season usually begins with IIFT and CAT and moves on to other exams like SNAP. Most students focus mainly on CAT without realising that other exams like SNAP can also help you in getting into prestigious colleges like SIBM and SCHMRD. To help you with your preparation for SNAP in this SNAP preparation article, we will highlight the important things you should keep in mind for the exam. But before I do that, let us have a look at the SNAP 2018 exam pattern and try to understand what is it that you need to do at this stage.

The major change introduced this year has been the inclusion of ‘Special Questions’. The official website mentions that: Normal Questions carry 1 mark for each question and Special Questions carry 2 marks for each question. Explaining what exactly are these special questions, the website has mentioned: For special questions in each section will have blanks where answers will have to be entered by the candidate by using the virtual keyboard. For example, if question is “What is the capital of Australia?” The candidate needs to enter the answer as CANBERRA by using the virtual keyboard.

In terms of the levels of the questions asked, the whole paper can be classified as easy to moderate (some sections and particular questions might be the exception here). If you look at the table above, you can clearly see that that there is almost an even split for the different sections in the exam and the exam provides you a clear opportunity to maximize your strengths and score the maximum in your strong suits.

SNAP Preparation: How to prepare in a few days?
A majority of students think about SNAP only after they have taken CAT and want to utilise the few days between CAT and SNAP fully. How should you approach SNAP if you have only few days to prepare? This is an important question and I recommend you to do the following:

Take at least 3 SNAP Mocks
Solve at least 3 SNAP mocks. You need to get acquainted to the exam pattern and more importantly, the ebbs and flows of the exam. You need to get used to switching between the sections, pushing yourself to solve as many questions as possible (remember, speed plays an important role in this exam) and understanding the overall approach you need to adopt in the exam. Mocks are the best way to achieve these goals.

Quick GK and Vocab Revision
Make sure you go through important Current Affairs for the last one year. Quickly revise the important bits (there are more than enough GK PDFs available online for you to do so). But please don’t obsess over GK. Your mind has a limited bandwidth for last-minute cramming and don’t burn yourself out. Remember, there will always be questions in GK that you think you have read something about and you still don’t know the answer. Don’t bother much about these.

The next thing for you to revise is your Word-list. Whatever words you have covered till now, go through them once and review them. Learn a few new words but not a lot; the chance of remembering these new words is very little.

Don’t miss out on these Reasoning topics
Do not miss out on the following reasoning topics: series, input-output, visual reasoning, coding-decoding, calendar, & Venn diagrams. While preparing for CAT, we often miss out on these reasoning topics and do not prepare for them. Make sure you solve some practice tests for these topics as well.

Quickly revise major Quantitative Aptitude topics
Most of you should have covered quantitative aptitude exhaustively for CAT. Quickly revise all major topics and make sure you solve some speed tests for QA. Generally, the level of QA questions is easy to moderate and you will do well to build some speed for solving QA questions in the exam.

SNAP Preparation: Five things to keep in mind for the SNAP exam:

In this how to prepare for SNAP article, it is important that I cover some important pointers that are going to help you refine your exam strategy. Keep these five points in mind while taking the exam:

Be quick with your question selection
It is important that you don’t get stuck on particular questions. Remember, there are 150 questions in the exam. That is a lot to cover in 2 hours and it makes sense that you are quick on your feet and you shift quickly from questions you cannot crack. Do not get emotional with questions and don’t keep solving ones you cannot crack.

Time Break-up is the key
It is important to balance your time among the different sections of the exam. A suggested time break-up that you can follow is:

You can suitably modify this break-up depending upon your strengths and weaknesses. But the above represents a fairly good break-up that helps you achieve the most out of every section.

Score Vs. Accuracy Gambit
This is a delicate balance that you need to strike. The SNAP of earlier years was purely a speed-based test with most of the questions belonging to the easy category. Over the last couple of years, the levels have gone up slightly and this means you need to strike a delicate balance between attempts and accuracy. Considering the cut-offs for the last couple of years and the overall scores required for getting calls from good SNAP colleges, you need to maintain an accuracy of about 70-75% with attempts ranging between 100-110. Keep this in mind while you build your overall strategy for the exam.

GK: Don’t get fussed about it
One thing you have to be ready for is weird questions in the exam. But you to remember then that these questions will be there for everyone. So don’t fuss much about these questions and select the ones you know.

There are some students who go all out in this section (especially if it features more sports, business and other popular topics) and try to maximize their scores in this section. Are you willing to take such a gamble? It is a gamble for sure but if you feel confident about the section, you can adopt a slightly aggressive approach in the exam. If the section features obscure questions or things you know very little about, then it makes sense to be conservative in this section.

No sectional time limit in the exam
Well, this very simply means you got to attack your strength areas. Remember, the time break-up I provided above is based on the assumption that you have decent proficiency in most areas. If there are particular areas you are exceptionally strong in, it makes sense that you shave off time from other sections and invest in this particular area. After all, it is all about maximizing your overall scores in this exam.

Well, this completes this ‘How to crack SNAP’ article. I have shared the important things you need to keep in mind for this section and the key things you should cover in the next few days. Make sure you incorporate these in your SNAP exam preparation and I hope you do amazingly well in the exam.