Any competition can be cleared on our own, without any coaching, provided we program ourselves for (1) schedule, (2) progress monitoring and (3) Self-assessment.
We always suggest students to make a schedule themselves or copy others study calendar. This study calendar should must have provision for 3 revisions of full syllabus in a calendar year. Loosing track in self-directed study without calendar is very common issue. Only critical and regular look back at the calendar forces us to reevaluate our calendar and its productivity. Self assessment during these revisions are very essential to maintain the efficiency. We advocate self assessment every 15 days in the calendar. Eventually, we need lots and lots of questions to test ourselves and monitor the progress continuously.
Parameters for the progress monitoring can be (1) ability to answer different types of queries (2) using least amount of time (3) with higher precision. Higher precision denotes least negative marks obtained. For most of the students, over-confidence leads to several wrong answers, eventually decreasing the overall marks obtained. So flunking the negative marked grading is normal scenario for over-confident students with less precision. In this situation, we advice students to count wrongly answered questions too along with overall grades.
Verbal answering is good for public performance and personality development, however, written lengthy exams pushes our brain in to the turbo mode, which we generally miss during casual question answering or on social media learning. Attempting whole sets of questions in tight time frame modulates us for turbo mode. Not being able to maintain the answering speed in stipulated time should be an alarming signal for our brain output frequency. Attempting more and more examinations help us improve our brain output frequency and connecting the virtual dots.
During our self assessment, we tend to ignore the missed questions, but think and discuss more about wrong questions after real examinations. Ultimately, it is that test which mimics the real examination help us learn more. So it always advisable to follow the similar test methods to prepare ourselves for examinations.
As we have limited attempts available for competitive examinations, it is highly recommended to attempt daily examinations followed by progress monitoring critically.
(By Dr Manish Pathak)