How to Prepare For GATE With One Month to Go

As GATE exam is just a month around, most of the students started heating up for GATE exam. This is the time when students are done with their regular engineering exams and it’s time to get really serious about GATE. If someone misses this month or doesn’t get serious with preparation then cracking GATE would just be a nightmare.

With a short time to prepare for GATE, that consists of four years of engineering courses, it can be a really a confusing task. Even students preparing yearlong could be puzzled about their approach for preparing for GATE. In this post I tried to give my approach toward competitive exams specially at the verge of the exam.

I know most of the students think that saying it is easier than doing it. But remember that to be successful, doing and trying hard is more important than just keeping on thinking. With this post I call all of you to leave your beds for a month. Exhaust yourselves, work hard and stay focused for GATE. Believe me you will make it happen or at least you will feel great that you gave a sincere try.

If you want to do great in GATE then there are five essential things you need to follow at this moment.

1. Easy subjects first
   When time is less for preparation, the best thing do is to start preparing with the subjects you feel easy about. As I mentioned in my earlier post that makes a priority of subjects when you have sufficient time to prepare and clear your doubts. If you analyze deeply, most of the subjects have almost the same weight age.
   Easy subjects will finish quickly and make you more confident. As soon as you finish a topic you will see more energy and excitement of cracking the GATE.
2. Use Short notes
   Try to collect short notes, such as brilliant tutorials, GATE forums or some other study material. This will help you speed up your preparation, as the notes don’t go into every detail of the subject, cover the essential concepts needed for the exam and save time.
   Do follow only one note as different notes may use different analogy and may lead to confusion.
3. Get Question banks
   Have a question bank or GATE questions’ answer book for sure. As soon as you finish a topic you can refer to different types of questions that can be asked. Don’t worry if you cannot solve all the questions. At least you will get an idea of the type of question you can expect and where do you stand.
4. Previous year papers
   Every GATE aspirant must solve previous year question papers. First and foremost it gives an idea about the GATE question paper. Secondly, sometimes you may get some questions from previous papers.
5. Avoid reading from soft copies
   It’s very common among student to search and download the soft copies of the books and notes. These soft copies can be easily found, downloaded and shared. But the disadvantage with soft copies is that you will read them on computer and can be easily distracted to other things like music, videos, internet … etc.
   It is always beneficial to make a hard copy of the important pages and avoid computer to concentrate well on the desired subject. You can also write down some important points if don’t want to have printed copy.
   The idea is to avoid all kind of distraction that prevents GATE preparation.

I would strongly recommend you to avoid all time wasters till the GATE exam. Time wasters can be TV, Movies, Music, Excessive Internet, Friends, and any other thing that consume your time without being beneficial for GATE preparations.

This is a part of GATE 2011 preparation guide. Do read other articles to know more about GATE and GATE preparations.

If you have a question or want to share some information, please feel free to drop a comment. Do not forget to subscribe for updates in email or facebook.
Do share the post with friends on facebook and help them to stay concentrated and focused for GATE exam.