Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering or GATE, a highly competitive entrance exam where lakhs of candidates appear for examination, is considered as an entry pass for students to start a career in PSU jobs and for admission to the master’s degree programme in the IITs.
As we enter December, the students who are getting ready to appear for GATE, they are left with two months preparation time.
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras is all set to conduct GATE 2019 in two shifts on February 2, 3 and February 9 and 10, 2019.
As we do in every major step we take in our life, preparation strategies are pivotal for career-deciding examinations like GATE.
In a bid to eliminate last-minute hassles, you need to make a separate timetable to study every day in the last 2 months before GATE exam.
Following are some tips that could help you manage your time better and score well.
Syllabus pattern
Mere understanding of the curriculum does never suffice the purpose of excelling in GATE. Candidates must be familiar with the pattern and style of questions asked in the exams.
Mock papers
Solving mock papers and previous years’ sample papers will not only help in providing much-needed practice but will also enhance the confidence of the students.
Avoid distractions while writing a mock exam. This will replicate the exam-like environment. Attempting one mock a day is enough. Practice from at least the last 15 years papers.
Study plan
Find out your areas of weaknesses and strengths and then prepare your study plan. Allocate time to cover all important topics and track your progress regularly.
Revision
With two months left for the exam, don’t let the exam pressure get to you. Revise as much as you can. The revision time should be two-hours a day. While revision might better be called rewriting, spend plenty of time revising your writing.
Quality answer
Quality answers fetch you marks. Always remember the R+R+A formula of writing an answer.
R= Recognise
R= Restate
A= Answer
Let us see this in the following example.
When you were in high school, who was your favourite teacher?
We should see that what the examiner is asking us about. The question starts off by saying when you were in high school but the information the examiner actually want is who was your favourite teacher. So what we must recognise is which of the 5 Ws is this actually referring to. Is it who, what, when, where or why? Since the question is actually asking about our teacher. We know that it’s talking about whom (who – teacher). So, now the Recognise stage is complete.
Restate stage– The second step is again to restate. Here what you need to do is restate the unused portion of the question. The first part was who was your favourite teacher from step one. But the remaining part of our question is ‘when you were in high school.’ This part becomes the part that we will use in our answer. We are going to restate this.
So when you were in high school is what’s going to be in the answer. But remember to answer this we have to answer this we have to say when I was in high school.
Answer– This is the third stage. So, when I was in high my favourite teacher was (Mr. Bose – a name of the teacher).
Sleep
Make sure you have six hours of sleep every day. Sleep allows the brain to comprehend and store the information. Studies revealed that students who get a good night’s sleep perform better.
Always remember that Toppers don’t do different things. They do things differently. This is the success mantra of students who score the highest marks. They answer what is asked and not what they know.
Therefore, it’s never too late to achieve exam success. Follow the above-mentioned tips to boost your exam performance.
