Things that I Learned from My Exam Preparation Mistakes

It is rightly said by the famous author Brandon Mull that, Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others. So in this article, I am going to tell you how smart I am who learned from my own mistakes and at the end of this article you are expected to learn from    my mistakes.

Categorizing the Topics

This is one of the common mistakes done by the students and I am also one of them. Friends, don't forget to categorize the questions into categories. Questions that needed to be practiced on Book, Important Questions and Most Important Questions or Topics. I am not telling you to do selective reading. There's nothing to lose revising important topics number of times. It gives you a lot of confidence.

List out crux Adjustments

If you see the Practical Questions, around 90% of adjustments are nothing new and are common in all questions. However, there will be some new point or tricky adjustment in each Question, which carries higher weightage of marks. When you are practicing problems, List of all the important adjustments from each question. This way you need to waste time during your revision, solving the entire problem. Just keep revising those adjustments. Also, once try making up your own Practical Question with these adjustments, and asking your friends to solve it.

Make beautiful presentation a habit from beginning.

Friends, generally while doing preparations we just do rough presentation specially in working notes, assumption etc. which in my opinion is not a correct practice. In reality, what happens is, we develop a habit of doing rough work in preparation and then it becomes our habit; this results as bad presentation in examination hall as we all know how much pressure one feels inside the exam hall. Here, i want to suggest you to also make sure your presentation of answers is upto mark. Its not just important that you have the knowledge, you have to prove it too. So that it will become your habit and you will be able to concentrate more on your solutions rather than presentations in your exams. One may think that it's immature type of comment but trust me friends, it is worth investing your time in good presentation. I have practically experienced it, when I appeared in paper of Management Accounting; I could just solve questions of 68 marks but my presentation was excellent so I managed to secure 53 marks in it. It is simply 'Jitna karo, Acche se karo' funda.

Whom to Meet As a common practice,
 I too met rankers and passed-outs before starting preparation. Here is what I learned from my meetings with seniors. Friends, before starting preparation we all meet our seniors for their guidance. Mostly the seniors to whom we choose to meet is the person who either had secured a rank or one who has cleared the exam in first or second attempt. But what I suggest is, Don't just meet rankers, also meet the people who have seen failure. Trust me students! You will learn many new things from a failure person rather than a ranker. We Cannot live long enough to make all mistakes by ourselves; therefore, learning from the mistakes of others is one step towards our goal.

Keep it close to Heart
While doing revision, I could not solve a question after trying repeatedly for it. Earlier, I had solved the same question twice but now I could not solve it. Then I went to my friend and asked him to try it. He tried to solve the same but even he could not succeed in first trial. Before going for second trial instead of reading the question from my book he opened his book and read it. This time he could solve the question. How? Friends, All of you may face the similar kind of problem. Here is the difference between the book of mine and my friend: He has written hints to the important concept or crux of the question in his mother tongue MEWARI or Hindi�. It helped him in recalling the concept immediately.

So, my suggestion is to write important concept or crux of the question in your particular mother tongue. While doing revision one can save lot of time as well as energy.

Tips on Theory subjects

This is the most common question and scepticism I keep hearing from students. The common hurdle faced by majority of us is while studying, we remember everything very easily but later on, we could not recall the same. Friends, What I suggest here is to read these subjects daily. I am not telling you to spend two-three hours on that daily. Just spend 20 to 25 minutes daily for one subject i.e. just read the chapter from the Practice manual of Institute.

As we all know Institutes practice manuals are very summarized and small in size and is also important from exam point of view. So one can hit two bird from single arrow i.e. revision of what you read (remembering it for long) and second is covering practice manual which is important from exam point of view

(Satish Siraparapu)