What Next??

"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. :)

Flash Cards - Preparation Strategy No 2

Here is your Long awaited sequel. I know i should be writing at a faster pace to cater to the needs of those writing GATE 2010. Given the fact that you have already mastered the usage of Terra Incognita, all that remains is resolving TI. What is the use of documentation if the data is not put to use. Yeah it is the abstract point "resolve your TI" (from my previous post)that i am going to elaborate here.

TI resolution can be done in many ways. Brute force method of randomly picking the topic and completing it really works fine(for a change :)). However, as u climb uphill, the burden of remembering things increases. What use is learning if you are not able to remember anything?? Here comes the flash cards/bathroom notes or whatever u call that.

Some people might want to argue that revision phase comes during the last month of preparation. But well, with syllabus as vast as GATE, i guess it should go hand in hand with the preparation phase.  

For most of you, this isnt a new strategy. You just needed someone to remind you of the strategies that you used in the past. That is precisely what i am doing now. For the others, well, lets see how it is done.

Take an A4 sheet, keep folding it in halves until it reaches a size that can fit in ur pocket(the reason for which can be found later). Now cut the edges so that it forms discrete pages. Pin it in the corner. Yipee !! your flash card is made. Make a book for each subject, probably u can use another A4 sheet and make a bigger booklet. Now as and when you resolve your TI, write down all that you want about that particular topic. Remember, your TI doesnt have detailed information, it is used for just documentation purpose.When does your TI entry become obsolete?? The moment you resolve that topic, your TI "entry" loses its value. So your flash cards are the only ones that are going to help you remember things. So make sure you note down all the important points(you can also include the silliest of the details).

Now that your booklet is made, u can carry it wherever you want, in ur pocket. This really helps if you are attending a boring lecture in your college.

U can use familiar techniques that you use in computer science to enhance your Flash card usage. For example,while revising the topics, on the first day lets say u revise one booklet. On the second day, u revise the first and second together. On the third day, u revise the second and third together etc.What is this strategy called(a well known technique u know)?? However, this ensures that you revise each booklet atleast twice.

At the end of your preparation make sure you have atleast 10 booklets for each subject. And let it be comprehensive. If you are able to do this, i am sure you will be break into the top 200 ranks.

Before Gate 2008

HISTORY OF PROPAGATE CS

Yet another 12th std flunker failing to make it big in IIT-JEE. May be i should ve decided that it was not my piece of cake. May be not, i was very close to making it big, but just missed it because it was destined not to happen. Craving for another chance to make it big, after endless thoughts of dropping a year and studying, with high reluctance, joined Meenakshi Sundararajan Engg. College. The initial days were terrible, only to be realised soon that my college was not all that bad.

Quickly by the end of 1st semester, realised that i was good at programming (atleast as compared to others in my class). Could this be a begining to a new success story?? Not yet.

With a lot of hope to make it big, joined a java class, stood first in the class too. But this could mean one of the two things. One that i am really good. and the other 'may be the others were worse than me'.   

EFFECT OF KRANTI'08 on my career (Karth-"Rags" Effect)

                  KRANTI, for those who do not know what it is , is our annual technical symposium conducted by the 3rd yrs. People good at various fields lead a team consisting of many 2nd yrs to organize an event. There was this event called Code Debugging, lead by Karthik Raghavan, my senior. With not many interested in programming, both from my class as well as his, we could not avoid being in touch with each other. 

Discussing long hours of interesting programming questions, we decided to give the participants a tough time. Took the good old theoretical computer science books, designed challenging questions that were probably never asked in the history of any programming contest. Managed to give a list of NP-complete and NP-Hard problems, asking them to solve it. Hence was born the real interest in Computer Science.

One day, Karthik comes up and tells there is this exam called GATE, the expansion of which neither of us knew. He says he had written it with minimal preparation and that the paper was pretty easy. Then came the result and he stood All India 800. Karthik decided to write GATE again and better his performance with a little bit of serious preparation.Karthik, being a serious GRE aspirant, the news of GATE was pretty shocking. He now needed a bunch of serious aspirants with whom he can prepare. 

After long hours of convincing pawan and anish, a group was formed. Hence the PROPAGATE-CS was born.