"I have studied with all my might over the past 5 months."
"I am well versed in 10 subjects."
"I have been getting within the top 100 ranks in the mock tests."
"I am better than my friends in most of the subjects."
All these statements do not make any sense if you are not able to perform in the 3hrs of the final Examination. All that matters here is your performance & if you dont give that, you just become one of the losers (doesnt matter if you've worked hard or not).
Preparation is like a pipeline(the computer architecture one ;)). What u feed into the pipe is your hardwork. what you get as the output is the degree of your success. More the hardwork u feed in, the better will be the success rate. That is not all, people forget about what happens inside this pipe. This is where i would place the purpose of this post.
It is really pathetic to lose out on achieving success, inspite of the enormous hardwork you ve done. Yes, it does happen at times. what happens if the pipe has a hole? what happens if the pipe has lesser capacity? Yes you ve gotta build this pipe such that your hardwork doesnt spill mid-way inside the pipeline.
Now again this pipeline can be thought to be made up of many connecting pipes. First, the "Revision" pipe. Second, the "management" pipe. Eventually your outcome can only be as large as the smallest pipe(bottleneck). ie, if your Revision is fool-proof and your management skills are pretty bad, then dont expect a 100% success. Similarly, having great management skills without revising the concepts might be of no use. In this post i just quote some of the management techniques that we came up with during our GATE preparation.
You are given say, 65 questions. Which ones do i answer first? say i start from the last, what if i am not able to answer 10 questions in a row; it sure will affect my confidence. what should i do? Now just think. If you are in such a situation during ur GATE exam. Here are some strategies tested by us. First, the one proposed by karthik. Once u receive ur paper, just scan the paper with a neutral view(dont look forward for questions from subjects of ur interest). scan them one by one and look out for the easy ones that require the least time to answer. Remember, in GATE papers such questions will always be there. Note: there might be questions that are very familiar to u but time consuming. just tick mark them and dont answer them for now. At the end of the FIRST PASS, you wud ve answered all the free hits. Now go for a second PASS, where u answer the questions u had marked previously. ie those which u know but are time consuming. Then go for a THIRD PASS, attack the tougher problems, these are just icing on the CAKE. u get them, its gr8. u dont get them, dont worry, after all those taking GATE are of ur caliber only. It wud be tough for them too. If u spend more than 3 mins on a question, u shud know, it is a TIME KILLER. Immediately skip to the next question. I know it is difficult to skip. But this can be mastered with a little bit of practise. This Strategy can only be used in GATE if u have answered atleast 5 papers before using the same.
Second, this is my own strategy. Start answering from the first, one mark questions. These are simpler and can be finished soon. So the strategy is to finish them within 30 mins after the start of the exam. Now start the paper from the last. (ie) the linked answer questions(questions that do not hav negative marking, something that shouldn be missed). The logic behind this is that, we are better suited to answer them when we are calm rather than postponing it till the end. Now we can proceed to answer the center part of the paper. This strategy has its own flaws. I also tried the alternate logic of answering the questions from the subject that i like the most. ie Networks. Then move on to answer all questions from say, TOC. But i should mention, it didnt work out well as i expected it to.
Third, this is again something that i came up with. The Guessing strategy. What are we writing the exam for? Marks. I am not that kind, who says i wont take up the marks that i dont deserve. I am not the kind like anish and pawan who only mark an answer if they are 100% sure. I was always ready to go for them as long as they dont get me into trouble(negative marking). There was a time when i was able to eliminate 2 out of the 4 choices. Now i have to choose 1. I usually went for such question. Yes i used to take a guess. :D. More often than not, u get many such questions. There is a possibility that this might back fire. Coming back to the strategy, mark ur guesses on the question paper, like say with a "G" besides the question. Dont mark them on the OMR sheet. after u complete the paper, take a percentage(like 10 %) of the questions u have correctly answered(say i answered 40 questions, then i can guess 4). U ve gotta mark only those number of guesses. Now from all the G's u have marked, select the most promising "G" questions and mark them. Another logic here is that if u get even one of the 5 G questions right, it will cover up for the rest. (ie) 2 * 1(correct) - .5 * 4(wrong ones) = 0.
It is expected that u figure out ur own strategy and practice it over time. It is possible that the strategy suitable for me doesnt work well for u. Well, which strategy did i finally use in my GATE. thats the subject of my next post. :)
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