Read This to Pass the 37th Preliminary Exam in 10 Days

(I wrote the following piece ten days before the 37th BCS preliminary examination. I’m sharing this with you. Read it at your own discretion and prepare for the preliminary exam using your own judgment.)

Dear friends!

I know this piece will be useful to you. That’s why I wrote it. The day I can no longer write anything useful, I’ll stop writing altogether. I promise you that. For now, please tolerate this friend’s interference.

A humble request. Please don’t call me or message me about BCS exam preparation strategies. It really irritates me. Because I don’t know of anyone who has written more about this subject or worked on it more than I have. Take the trouble to search through my notes and read those pieces. Beyond what I’ve said in those writings, I know nothing more, understand nothing more. If you have time, watch my Career Adda videos on YouTube—you’ll surely benefit from them. Beyond this, I don’t have time to give you individually. Please view my inability with understanding eyes.

The exam is on the 30th. Counting down, you have ten days left. Regardless of what you’ve studied before or haven’t studied, if you start preparing from absolute zero at this point, is it possible for you to pass the preliminary exam and get your passport to the written exam? This depends largely on three factors.

One. Your self-confidence.

Two. Your basic knowledge.

Three. Your mindset for tremendous hard work.

Let me break this down a bit.

The first one. For those who perform well in exams, the role of preparation in their good results is far less significant than the mindset of “I can definitely do this.” In any competition, what creates the main difference between winners and losers is confidence. You might ask, why should those who haven’t studied much before remain confident? You should remain confident because just as good preparation doesn’t guarantee passing the preliminary exam, poor preparation doesn’t guarantee failure either. Actually, there’s no such thing as good or poor preparation. What exists is performing well or poorly in the exam. People succeed when they truly believe from their heart that they can do that task. The more someone believes this, the better their performance. I know that at this time, you’re caught in the dilemma of whether confidence is necessary for success, or whether success is necessary first to become confident. Everyone faces this. You’re nothing exceptional. But among all this, whoever can hold themselves together with infinite patience—they are the exception, they will surely move forward.

The second one. Use the subjects you’re already good at as your main weapons for passing the preliminary exam. Let me tell you about mine. If I had to sit for the preliminary exam right at this moment while writing this, regardless of what the questions might be, I would definitely pass. I’ve added the emphatic particle ‘-ই’ to the verb in that previous sentence. Why? With what infinite confidence? I’ll tell you. Before sitting for any exam, I decide what my trump cards are. If I consider the preliminary exam, here’s what I would do. I can correctly answer all the questions that come from mathematical reasoning (at most one or two might be wrong). I’ll make mistakes in only 3-4 questions in mental ability. In science and technology, I might get 4-5 wrong. I should get 80% marks in English. At least 65% in Bengali. In Bangladesh and international affairs, even a complete fool would get 35%. If the questions follow conventional patterns, this is roughly how it should go. Even if the questions are difficult, there’s no problem. In that case, the cut-off marks would also come down. That’s it! I should pass the preliminary exam if I take it this way, shouldn’t I? In the few days you have ahead, put more effort into the 4 segments you’re good at. Always remember: only your result is rewarded, not your efforts. So definitely give your effort in a result-oriented way.

The third one. You’ll have to work inhumanly hard these few days. If you truly need this job, you can work 17 hours daily for these few days. I can’t say enough good things about the Kolkata actor Soumitra Chattopadhyay—whatever I say would be insufficient. If he, at 83 years old, can work 8-9 hours of shooting daily and then spend another 4-5 hours writing out of passion for acting and writing, then can’t you, at just 27-28 years old, study an average of 17 hours daily for just 10 days? Our former National Professor Kabir Chowdhury was a renowned educationist, essayist, and translator. He died at 88. On the day of his death, or the day before (I don’t remember exactly), he had translated 30 pages. The famous Bengali intellectual writer and distinguished thinker Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s last book ‘Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse’ was published when he was 99 years old. In his lifetime, he read nearly 10,000 books. The only damage that excessive hard work caused him in life was that he died “prematurely” two months before his 102nd birthday. All three examples are of distinguished Bengalis. Their physical constitution was certainly not much stronger than yours or mine. But their mental constitution was a hundred times stronger. The more you need this job, the more mentally prepared you’ll be to work hard—I believe this. People get tired more from mental reasons than physical ones. Look, when I’m completely exhausted from studying, if someone asks me to go shopping, touring, or dating, all my fatigue disappears instantly! What is this but foolishness? The more you fool around with life, the more life will fool around with you. Remember, in the next 10 days, you need to dedicate exactly 170 hours to studying without any slacking off. You’ll pass the preliminary exam if you can do this, even if you haven’t studied anything before. That’s it!

Whatever your preparation has been until now, here’s what you can do (and what you should avoid) in these 10 days ahead, according to my personal opinion:

One. Buy any good model test guide from the market and take 5 sets of model tests daily. Take at most an hour and fifteen minutes to mark answers for each set. Because in the exam hall, you’ll need to fill in circles, which will take some extra time. Besides, tension will also work in the exam hall, which might slow down your circle-filling speed somewhat. Being tense during exams is normal etiquette. No problem! For these 10 days, don’t leave your study room unless absolutely necessary.

Two. Don’t receive anyone’s phone calls unless absolutely necessary. If someone falls ill, or if someone very close to you calls for urgent reasons, then receive it. Is your girlfriend running away with someone else? Let her go. She would have run away later anyway. The scene of a girlfriend running away is one of the most beautiful, natural, eternal scenes in the world. The sooner she runs, the better. Thank goodness! You don’t have time to think about these things for the next few days. You don’t need to meet anyone unless absolutely urgent. If you study properly during this time, your moon-like face should turn into a twisted face. So rather than going in front of people and scaring them, it’s better to close your doors and windows and study, isn’t it? Your face looks bad, but that doesn’t mean you can scare people! That’s wrong—having a bad face isn’t wrong. Give your mobile phone, TV, Facebook, Imo, Viber, WhatsApp a holiday for these 10 days. In the kingdom of unemployment, the world is painful. The cruel world doesn’t even tolerate the sweet romantic smiles of the unemployed.

Three. Read through one good preliminary digest completely and very quickly. Solve various preliminary special issues. Revise previous years’ question banks and one job solution. You might ask, what if the questions aren’t conventional? I say this: since you haven’t done much more studying by going through reference books thoroughly and solving thousands of questions, you’ll have to accept this much punishment for slacking off. The funny thing is, mainly due to nervousness factors, everyone’s mental state in the exam hall remains more or less the same. That is, in psychological analysis, you’re not behind anyone. Thinking about whether questions will be easy or difficult is simply wasting time. You have no control over whether questions are easy or difficult. Instead of wasting time thinking about something you have no control over, study. If it’s difficult, it’s difficult for everyone; if it’s easy, it’s easy for everyone. Everyone has the same pace, and so do you. You’re not some special important person that separate cut-off marks would be calculated for you.

Four. Study by question sets, not subject by subject. How? Suppose you’ll study Bengali. Fine, study it. But you don’t have time now to keep studying only Bengali. This might result in less emphasis on some subjects. At this time, read through as many complete question sets as possible from job solutions, preliminary digests, and question banks. Don’t read the discussion sections. No need. If you read through many question sets, you’ll see that some questions repeat. Seeing them repeatedly, a photocopy of them gets created in your head automatically. You don’t need to spend separate time on any subject. If someone does that, you won’t be able to prepare in a balanced way.

Five. Place the least emphasis on general knowledge. If common questions come up, you’ll manage them naturally. If utterly bizarre, uncommon questions appear, no matter how much you prepare, you won’t be able to answer them. Yet there are other topics—mathematics, grammar, and several more—where if your basics are strong, you can answer correctly even when questions are difficult. In these ten days, there’s no need to read newspapers or follow the news. If the world comes to an end, you’ll find out somehow anyway. You’ll have plenty of time to learn the juicy details about why Aishwarya remains captivating even at this age after your prelims are over. For now, stay offline!

Six. 6.1. Forgive those questions that are extremely difficult and refuse to stick in your memory despite repeated reading. Keep easy questions in your head, difficult ones in books. Trying to memorize one extremely hard question drives five easy ones out of your mind. The marks are the same—what’s the point? This isn’t the time to indulge in losing five or 7.5 marks for the sake of one mark. 6.2. Should you attempt confusing questions? Let me answer this with a twist. Isn’t it better to attempt all eight confusing questions and get half wrong for two marks, rather than leaving them blank and getting zero? Confusing questions are designed precisely to slow down your pace of filling circles. 6.3. Questions that contain errors—whether you attempt them or not, you’ll get marks. PSC excludes these when evaluating, meaning they give everyone average marks for such questions. 6.4. Some questions have multiple correct answers. What should you do? Mark any one correct answer and you’ll get the mark. Why does PSC include wrong answers or questions with multiple answers? Because they’re careless, irresponsible, and indifferent? Not at all! These are included deliberately to confuse and unnerve you. When you become confused and nervous, your confidence drops. And that means those two hours belong to someone else, not you! Everyone practices, but when it’s game time, the field belongs to Tendulkar alone. Why? Because of preparation? Skill? No. Because of confidence and technique. On the field, he who plays like a king becomes king. To play like that, you need a king’s heart.

Seven. Don’t waste time finding out who’s studying what or what questions should be covered. In these ten days, you won’t speak a single word about BCS with anyone. What’s it to you what others are doing? At day’s end, the responsibility for all your success and failure rests entirely with you. Life isn’t a destiny company; life doesn’t run on the principle of “together we’ll build our dream.” Success is a selfish game, and so is failure. What you can do, you can do for your own good; what you can’t, you can’t for your own good. You need a score of five—whether it comes from two and a half plus two and a half, two plus three, three plus two, one plus four, four plus one, zero plus five, or five plus zero, however it happens, as long as it happens. You don’t need to know the mystery of how it happened. Trust that you will achieve the number you need. You won’t have to depend on anyone else for it.

Eight. Most of the time, coaching center heroes, campus-library champions, and word-of-mouth legends turn into zeros in the exam hall. What’s the use of being a hero before the battle? Prepare to be a hero during and after the battle. Those who boast too much before exams can’t find places to hide their faces after results come out. Results always come at the end of the game, not before!

Nine. It’s better not to study after 8 PM on the 29th. Instead, immerse yourself in something light that you enjoy—soft instrumental music, movies, whatever. Pack everything you need for the exam hall the next day. Eat a light dinner and sleep by 10 PM. Get at least eight hours of sleep. Sleeping less at night greatly increases the chances of a poor exam performance the next day.

Ten. Wake up the next morning and pray for a while. Then freshen up, have breakfast (don’t eat too much—this might make you want to use the bathroom unnecessarily during the exam. Two types of people use the bathroom during exams: fools who want to observe the scenic beauty of toilets and their surroundings, and the helpless who genuinely need to go), and head to the exam hall with plenty of time to spare (without any books). Before leaving home, check once more that you have everything you need.

Eleven. Fill in the set code and other information on your answer sheet carefully and calmly. If this goes wrong, everything is lost.

Twelve. Start with the section you know best. However, be very careful to match which question number you’re answering with which circle you’re filling. Not all questions need to be answered. Greed leads to sin, sin to negative marks. Usually, our ability improves when we think about something a second time. Mark questions you can’t answer at first glance and move to the next one. The exam hall is not a research lab—there’s no time to waste.

Thirteen. Getting tired of filling circles? Take a short break. Imagine how your life will change once you get this job, picture the happy faces of your loved ones—the fatigue will vanish. The thought that works most magically in exam halls is the “I am the best” mindset. Take the exam believing that no one is performing better than you. Thinking anything else will only harm you.

Fourteen. There’s no rule about how many answers you need to mark to pass. Answer what you know. Don’t give extra importance to any question—easy or difficult, each carries one mark. Don’t look around to see how many others are marking or which ones they’re choosing. This might make you mark several questions you know incorrectly out of greed for one mark. Without looking at anyone else, simply answer what you know. Of course, even if you don’t look, answers to some unknown questions will mysteriously float through the air into your ears. Whether to accept or reject these—that decision will be made by your in-the-moment IQ.

In the next ten days, at least thirty years of your life’s history could be written. Whether that history will be one of joy or sorrow—ninety-five percent of that power is in your hands right now. How you use it, or whether you use it at all, is entirely your personal matter. I’ve simply shared my opinion all this while. Your life is yours; you’ll decide how to live it. No matter how great a BCS expert someone might be, in the exam hall, due to environment, mental state, and other circumstances, their level and everyone else’s remains roughly the same. The exam bell will ring, you’ll start from zero, and so will everyone else. No one is inferior to anyone in any aspect! Who can take that zero the farthest in two hours—that will determine who wins and who gets eliminated!

Enter the battle—we’ll meet there! I’ll be waiting.

Sushanta Pal

Your Senior Colleague