Students’ Speak: This should be your GATE preparation strategy

By: Tata Subramanian

As you must be all gearing up for Graduate Aptitude Test for Engineering (GATE), here are some of the tips I would like to share which help you with the upcoming GATE exam as well as for next year.

GATE Scoring Topics

For mechanical engineering, your primary focus should be on topics such as the strength of materials, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, the theory of mechanics, manufacturing engineering, engineering maths and general aptitude. These are the topics where maximum weightage is given in terms of marks. That being said you can’t ignore learning other topics.

Revision approach

In my opinion, start revising subjects which you find most difficult and then start revising topics in which you are strong. Always make sure you revise any subject at the end of each week. Have revisions segregated weekly and monthly where you will revise all the concepts you studied during a particular week and then at the end of the month take corresponding quizzes or mock tests to revise every month.

Taking regular topic-wise tests will help you in strengthening your concepts and with each revision, you will be more confident with the topics you learnt.

GATE Study Material

The books provided by the college are usually good and can clarify your concepts. However, please study only those topics from books that are in the GATE syllabus. Also taking class notes would be useful for you and make sure you clarify the concepts with your friends and professors immediately.

If you still want to read further or have reference books, your college library would be the ideal place. I am sure there would be books related to gate practice tests and other study materials. Books from publishers such as Wiley, Arihant, etc., have proper standard and I would suggest you refer books from these publishers.

GATE Exam Structure

GATE consists of three sections: General ability, numerical ability and subject-specific section. The duration of the exam is three hours and is an online computer-based test. Total marks for the exam is 100 and the total number of questions is 65. The question types consist of multiple-choice questions (MCQ) and numerical-answer-type (NAT). There is negative marking only for MCQs with 1/3^rd for 1-mark questions and 2/3^rd for 2-mark questions.

About the Author:

Tata Subramanian is pursuing MBA from Thiagarajar School of Management (TSM) in Marketing and HR. He is a passionate public speaker who is enthusiastic about new technologies in marketing. A fan of crime fiction novels, he loves to study human nature. He is also a core committee member of debating and quiz club.