Today I am going to tell you how you can improve your speed and reduce the number of errors in the exam. My experience is that if you can just reduce the number of errors, you will end up with a very good rank. The key idea here is time management, which will help you with this. You might be thinking that 3 hours time is more than enough for solving the GATE exam paper and you don't need to worry about time. It's true that 3 hours is more than enough for solving the GATE exam paper, but it's true only if you do good time management. I suggest that the day before your exam think about the strategy, you are going to use in the exam, to get better result. If you want, you can also consider the strategy used by me in GATE Computer Science 2012 exam. But I would suggest that you make your own strategy, because you know yourself better.
My strategy was to solve the GATE exam paper in the following ordered steps:
Try to solve one marks technical questions as much as possible
Try to solve maximum no. of aptitude questions (including one marks and two marks questions)
Now solve all the 2 marks technical questions
After this recheck all of the questions you have solved
Try to solve those questions, you could not solve earlier
Again recheck your complete exam paper
Fill the bubbles
While following this order, keep time management in your mind. First of all think that you have to solve this exam within 2 hours and 30 minutes. Then subdivide this 2 hours and 30 minutes time in above 7 steps and try to complete each step within this time limit. Many times it happens that when we get stuck on a tricky question, we waste a lot of time on that question and later we find that we have no time left to complete the exam. For this I suggest that you subdivide this 2 hours and 30 minutes time in the following way:
Complete the first step with first 15 minutes and don't give a question more than 1 minute. If some question is taking more than 1 minute, then leave it for step 5
Complete the second step within 10 minutes and don't waste much time on this part. If some question is left, try it again in step 5
Complete the third step within 45 minutes and don't give a question more than 2 minutes. If some question is taking more than 2 minutes, then leave it for step 5
Complete the fourth step withing 20 minutes. This is the step where you will find your silly mistakes. If you take this step seriously, you can reduce the number of errors
Complete the fifth step within 25 minutes. This is the step where you will be improving your ranking
Complete the sixth step withing 20 minutes. In this step, you will also have chance to find the mistakes, you could not find in step 4
Now you have 15 minutes left to fill the bubbles and you are done :-)
Now you might be thinking that where to use the 30 minutes left, since you have done everything within 2 hours 30 minutes. The answer is that it's difficult to complete each step within strict time limit. So it's better if you have some extra time, which you can utilize based on your need. One last and very important point that I would like to make is: start practicing it from today while solving the previous year GATE question papers as suggested by me in my last blog post. Otherwise it would be difficult for you to do the time management in the exam.