Meet Dhatri Mehta, IIT Bombay student who scored 99.99 percentile in CAT 2024 result, aims to pursue...

The Indian Institute of Management Calcutta has released the results for the Common Admission Test (CAT) 2024 on 19 December 2024. Among the 2.93 lakh candidates who appeared for the exam, 14 achieved a perfect 100 percentile, marking a significant milestone in the race for admissions to premier management institutes in India. 

According to the Indian Express report, 21-year-old Dhatri Mehta scored 99.99 percentile in the CAT 2024. She scored in the 99.99 percentile this year, along with another female contender. Only one of the 14 candidates that received the 100 percentile is a woman.

She balances her rigorous academic commitments as a final-year electrical engineering student at IIT Bombay with her aspirations of getting accepted to IIM Ahmedabad, where she intends to focus on finance.

She was raised in an academically inclined family; her mother is a homeopathic physician, and her father holds an MBA in finance. She has always been motivated by her upbringing, which instilled in her a strong love of learning. “Since I was a child, I loved studying. This passion helped me crack JEE Advanced and eventually choose electrical engineering at IIT Bombay,” she told indianexpress.com.

Her path was difficult. She had little time for preparation because of a very hard semester at IIT Bombay and a two-month internship.

“Those were testing times, but I reminded myself of my goal and stayed persistent,” she added. She credits her family, especially her father, for being a constant source of motivation. “He would often say, ‘If others can do it, so can you,’ and that mantra kept me going.”

In November 2023, she made the decision to start her CAT preparation despite the demands of her engineering curriculum. "The ability to go over lectures at my own pace helped me stay on track during weeks when my academic load was heavy," she recalls.

Three components make up the CAT exam: Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR), Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC), and Quantitative Ability (QA). Her technical background gave her a solid basis in QA, but it took a lot of work to grasp the subtleties of the other aspects. "I learnt how to strategically approach questions and efficiently understand passages from the tutor's lectures for VARC. In the same way, I was able to increase my speed and accuracy for DILR by practicing a lot and taking mock exams," she also added.

Her approach to preparation changed with time. She answered questions at random at first, but with practice and mock exams, she was able to come up with a methodical strategy. She would scan every set for DILR, classify them as easy, medium, or hard, and then rank them in order of difficulty. She concentrated on increasing her reading comprehension score for VARC before attempting verbal ability questions as "bonus marks." To improve her math speed for QA, she went over basic ideas like multiplication tables, squares, and cubes again.