Students’ Speak: Top GATE preparation tips to ace the exam

By: Abdullah Salman

Try to give at least one mock each week as to know where you stand after once you have covered all the basics. if you could enrol at least two different mock tests.

Every year over 10 lakh students apply for GATE to get admission into various Indian Institute Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs) or jobs in public sector undertaking (PSUs). If you want to start your preparation now. You need a good strategy to ace GATE 2021.

There are five steps which you could follow in order to keep your preparation up to the mark.

GATE Syllabus & Exam Pattern

GATE 2021 will be an online test and will have around 65 questions with multiple choice and numeric answer based. You should know your strength and weakness based on the syllabus of your respective domains. Know the weightage as per your knowledge of it prior.

GATE Books and materials

The major tool in your preparation part to ace the exam. Choose one or two standard books for understanding the concept and do not rely on so many books ending up with confusion. Enrol for online materials as well, but at the condition that you will not get distracted by those online study material. Take all the books and notes which you prepared during your engineering as those will be a kickstart for your preparation.

GATE Planning

Once all the materials and syllabus you have accumulated the next important step is to prepare and strategise your preparation journey as you will have hardly a year from now and you could spend at least two hours of your study with utmost focus even though if you are studying or doing the job. This could be monthly or weekly or daily or entire course planning of your preparation which could be followed religiously and gauged wisely as not to leave any stone unturned.

GATE Mocks & Analysis

Try to give at least one mock each week as to know where you stand after once you have covered all the basics. if you could enrol at least two different mock tests. Before you start giving mocks I would recommend you to undergo topic wise teste series as this will be very helpful before your full length mock as in which are the topics you are strong and weak. So while attempting full length mocks you will be clear enough as to attempt which topics and which not as the GATE exam also have negative marking. So, spend double the time on analysing the mock and practise a lot.

GATE Revision

Once you have completed your syllabus, I would highly suggest you go for at least thrice a time revision of the entire syllabus and make topic/unit wise handwritten short notes especially formulae, diagram, etc to keep remember concepts for a long time and for a quick revision.

About the Author:

Abdullah Salman M. is currently pursuing an MBA in General Management from TSM, Madurai. He has 15 months of work experience as a Network Engineer. He hails from Vellore, Tamil Nadu and has previously completed BE (ECE), from Anna University, Chennai.