180 Minutes
It doesn't matter if you have slogged for sixteen hours or studied meaningfully for six hours. It doesn't matter if your life style in the run up to the exams was more Saint-like or of the reckless type. It doesn't matter if you are a theist or an atheist. It doesn't matter if you have worked hard or worked smart. What matters on the examination day is what you do in those one hundred and eighty minutes.
This post explores some of aspects that a student could probably take care of during those one hundred and eighty minutes, and offering some tips in the process.
Anxiety and Excitement
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| For Every War.... |
Neither should a student get anxious about a question which appears to be tough or unmanageable, nor should he or she be all the more excited merely because few questions tested are the ones that he or she studied the day before, or very comfortable with. Both are dangerous. Excitement makes students overconfident and miss out on small differences in the question, and skipping of steps. Anxiety kills the students confidence for substantial time, and make him/her miss out on really simple questions. [Btw, the adjacent motivational image was designed by the British Government before the Second World War. Fitting I would say, for the exams these days, which are more of Guerrilla attacks than anything else]
45 - 75 - 100 Rule
Though not in the league of Pareto Analysis, this simple little rule is something that makes the most sense in an exam. Now before we elaborate, just read this -
180 minutes for 100 Marks. Reduce 30 minutes for reading the question and basic review. That leaves you with 150 minutes for 100 Marks or roughly 1.50 Minutes per mark. And hence, for a ten mark question, you should not be spending more than 15 minutes and for a 16 Mark Question, you should not be spending more than 24 minutes. You should allocate last five minutes for reviewing your answers.
Now don't try saying that above unless you are popularly known as Gapten. Logical it may sound, we hold the above devoid of practicality. Not every question is equally known to us or take proportionate amount of time. You have a ten mark question that would take ten minutes. You do get a five mark question that could take fifteen minutes. To reduce these differences to one and half a minute per mark equation would be like telling Indian Cricket Team's attire manufacturers to make every pajamas of the same length. Be it Sachin Tendulkar or Ishant Sharma!
To invoke Costing in the process, the limiting factor in an examination is the time. Therefore, we should maximize the returns per unit of time. Logic, therefore, demands that we attempt those questions which yield the maximum returns per unit of time. We strongly recommend students to attempt and knock off atleast 45 marks worth of questions in the first hour. Cumulatively, 75 Marks worth of Questions in the first two hours, and obviously the entire 100 Marks by the end of 3 Hours.
To sum it up - Clear the paper in the first hour. Hit the exemption level in the next. And go for glory in the last hour.
Attempting a sixteen mark question right at the outset of an examination (such as Consolidation or Amalgamation etc), knowing very well that it could take 40 to 45 minutes is more of a tragedy. This is rank poor time management. We don't believe that solving a "big" question will give you confidence to attack the result of the questions. It will instead kill your time, and take away the confidence in total as you near the last hour, with still fifty marks worth of questions remaining unanswered.
Review In The Middle
What can one review in the last five or even ten minutes, if he or she is still busy writing the answers? In these days of internal and concurrent audits, pushing review to the end sounds like poor thought process, than any great strategy. Fact of the matter is that, you need to be even more calm while reviewing the answers than when you were writing it. And you cannot obviously push this review process when there is maximum pressure (if you are still writing some answers towards the end).
Our recommendation, which continues from the previous one, is more about doing the first review at the end of the second hour, by which time you should have completed around seventy five marks of the questions. This would ensure that we do the review process when we are relatively calm (as against reviewing with barely five minutes left), and the review covers substantial portion of the answers.
Consistency
We insist on consistency in presentation and legibility more than decorative approach to the exams. An exam paper with a legible handwriting fetches more than an examination paper with illegible handwriting, with more decoration. We are not against people using multi colour approach to presenting the answers. But that should not be at the cost of a legible handwriting. Maintaining the calm throughout the one hundred and eight minutes would definitely ensure legibility.
These are some of the points that we thought of sharing with the exam season just ahead. Do share your inputs as well.
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