Tips for Avoiding Mistakes While Preparing for Competitive Exams

Preparing for competitive exams is indeed a very stressful time. It is crucial to understand that making any kind of error while preparing for a competitive exam can cause you to veer off course and negatively impact your academic preparation. Additionally, it will lead to subpar performance and grades, which will impede one’s ability to accomplish great things. Every competitive exam, including UPSC, NEET, SSC, JEE and JEE Mains, requires commitment and sincerity.

Here are some tips that can help you avoid mistakes during preparation for competitive exams.

Tips to Avoid Mistakes During Preparation for Competitive Exams

1. Mugging up

Mugging up concepts and topics is a weird habit that you might have picked up during your school days. This tactic will do more harm than good when it comes to competitive examinations. Simply put, cramming concepts or topics without understanding the logic behind them can lead to forgetting what you’ve learned. It will also take more time to finish a small topic as you are trying hard to feed your brain with no conceptual understanding. The chance of ruining your entire paper and future is confirmed if your preparation revolves around scrumming.

2. Improper revision

To understand a concept and to make sure that you don’t forget it, there will be a need for revisions during the preparation. A student who disregards revision cannot fairly attend the exam with confidence. The human brain needs to be trained every now and then to retain information. Understanding a concept just once and leaving it as it is will not help you recollect those concepts while you are attempting the exam. Keeping aside some time of the day to revise the previous day’s topics will help you stay on top of concepts and topics.

Learn More: How to Make Revision Notes for NEET Exam?

3. Underestimating diligence

From a very young age, students are taught to work harder than to work smarter. There are many ways to cover a certain topic in smarter ways than putting in more hours. It would be wise to see for yourself the different ways in which you can learn a particular topic or concept, and how imbibing those tricks into your daily learning routine can help you score higher marks. Make sure you mix both smart work and hard work together to ace your competitive examination.

4. Mock tests- true saviors

Mock tests are sample tests that you get from online or offline publications in which questions are prepared and laid out in a similar pattern to the original exam. Attempting as many mock tests as possible will provide you with much better confidence to face the real exam. Mock tests will help you understand your strong and weak areas. It will help you put in more time and effort to understand topics that are not your strong suit. So, not practicing with mock tests will hamper your chances of scoring well in the competitive exam.

Read More: Importance of Mock Tests in Competitive Exam Preparation

5. Lack of motivation

No matter how many coaching sessions you take and whether you have a dedicated tutor, scoring well for the exam solely depends on you. The coaching classes and tutors can only help you learn and understand the topics; they will not help you with motivation, which you have to muster all by yourself. The push for learning and finally giving the exam in full swing has to be done by you with maximum focus and courage. Unless and until you have the swag to do well, the rest of the factors will be useless.

6. Procrastinating

Procrastination is a bane for everyone, and it is indeed not an ideal characteristic for a student. Procrastination is where you constantly say that you will start studying tomorrow and that day never comes. It would be wise to quit that habit and start with something small and eventually go for bigger portions to learn. Pushing it away for days will end up with you having less time for exam preparation and eventually not faring well for the examination. Starting with a good understanding of your routine and setting an adaptive time for learning can be the first step against procrastination.

7. No clarity of the exam

When you enlist yourself for the exam, the first step right after should be to learn and understand in-depth the pattern and syllabus for the examination. Understanding the syllabus beforehand will help you plan strategies that will contribute productively to your learning process. It will also help you dedicate time to the exact topic. The weightage of marks and the difficulty level of each topic will help to analyze the number of hours that have to be put in for each topic or subject. Without this, you will waste too much time beating around the clock and finally give an extremely poor performance in the competitive exam.

8. Multitasking

The ability to multitask is a good characteristic to possess. But, truth be told, all that you do while multitasking will be incomplete. Multitasking is something that should not be attempted while you are preparing for your exams. It will not give you the frame to focus on your studies, and you will end up not being able to figure out what you have studied and the time dedicated will be rendered useless. Make sure you avoid distractions and concentrate on your studies while you are at it. Also, it would be ideal to finish a topic or a concept and call it a break. Do not leave a topic incomplete, as it might be difficult to get back on track from where you left off.

9. Starting late

For exams like NEET and IIT JEE, preparing well in advance has a lot of benefits. But to do that, you have to be extremely serious about the exam and its preparation. Starting to study just a few weeks before the exam is indeed a waste of time, and it is for sure that there are hardly any chances to ace the exam. A dedicated and committed plan and preparation at least two or three months in advance can assist you in covering all topics and incorporating one or two full revisions. Waive off the pressure of starting at the last minute and give yourself ample time for preparation.

Read More: Tips to Crack Entrance Exams in the First Attempt

10. Having favorites

It is quite natural for you to have areas, topics, or subjects that you might find interesting. Giving more importance to those concepts and giving no consideration to others might land you in trouble. It is advisable to dedicate equal time to all subjects and topics and maybe more time for areas in which you are weak or find it difficult to comprehend. Setting deadlines daily or weekly can help you give equal time for all the topics on the exam.