Better process for Exam preparation

Better process for Exam preparation

This article puts across a new thought to help students prepare for the examinations. It talks about a process that lowers the risk of failure in early phase of the exam preparation cycle and chances of success increases.

In today's competitive world it is important to have a proper strategy to gain success in examinations and to stand above the crowd. This article puts across a new thought to help students prepare for the examinations. The syllabus for competitive exams like IIT-JEE, CPMT etc. is very wide and students find it tough to prepare completely due to lack of time. As a result, they miss solving the practice test papers, which is a very important part for preparation cycle.

Students generally follow "Waterfall" approach for preparation .They spend round 95% of the time preparing for the course subject and then at last they start solving the practice test paper . In brief "Waterfall" methodology recommends a sequential list of steps to complete a particular task. Hence, students following this methodology think that they should solve papers until are unless they are thorough with the theory, Now while solving test paper if they realize that they missed some portion during theory preparation or that they require more knowledge in some portions , there is not enough time left to improve on these things and they BANG! The situation becomes gloomy . Thus in this approach, the risk for failure is high most of the time during the preparation life cycle.

So, in case you are also following the "waterfall" methodologies, you are risking draining away your success story in the same "waterfall". BEWARE!!

This article recommends another methodology to approach the same monster - examination preparations. This approach is a new strategy based on the iterative approach for exam preparation. This process finds the high risks areas (like missing important and tough topics) and tries to work on it early in the preparation cycle .Thereby, the chances of success increases by leaps and bounds.

According to this method, first the syllabus is prepared quickly without going much deep in all the topics (spend only 50% of the total time). After having a surface level knowledge, immediately the practice test papers need to be taken up. Based on the result, one can access his/her shortcomings and can strategize and prioritize the topics within the course which need attention. Another iteration of going through the theory starts and this time, the pain points are addressed and the others are hovered over. Each loop is a different iteration and in the complete life cycle of preparation a student need to complete at least 3 iterations. By this iterative approach, not only it is made sure that multiple revisions is done but also preparation is in line to the questions papers which anyway is the whole soul objective of the complete process.

Start
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Prepare theory--1
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attempt test papers
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Assess the preparation
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Is preparation No
in line with papers?-----Goto 1
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| Yes
Ready for the big day

The above flow diagram attempts to summarize this approach in a simple flow chart. In our belief, the best advantage of this process is that the whole approach of preparation is aligned to problem solving which gives a much better understanding if you compare to the approach of hours of just theory reading.

In the "Iterative" approach you see that the same course was covered many times and also that there were 3 checkpoints within the preparation which mitigated the following possible risks: -

1. The speed of preparation is too slow to complete everything.
2. The priority set for various topics of preparation is wrong.
3. Topics of more "examination-importance" are not given enough attention.
4. Effort is being wasted over subjects/topics which don't hold much value in examination.
5. Some important aspects being totally neglected and not being touched upon.

Thus following this process for exam preparation, lower the risk of failure in early phase of the preparation cycle and chances of success increases. Please do try to practice this approach and see the results for your self!

About Author

Amit Srivastava is presently working as Software Engineer .He had completed his M-tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur

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