What is the secret to a good rank?

Revision.

Part A

This seems like a really easy concept to understand but, ironically, 90% don’t understand it at all.

This included me too at one point, so I’ll try my best to clarify what revision should actually mean to you.

Let’s take a practical example:

I wrote an article a few days back, listing down AND asking you to memorise “Intermediate Filaments”. Can you name all 6 of them now?

Yes, there’s six of them which I’d listed and specifically asked to memorise: And a good majority have forgotten them by now.

Try another more realistic example:

Solve 100 MCQs in any subject, or any random subjects. After a week, resolve the same. Did you hit 100%?

Obviously not.

Does it matter? NEET is a 300 Q Paper, and assuming all of those 100 MCQs would’ve come, you just lost 30 x 4 = 120 Marks flat in a week if you answered just 70 right.

That’s how the brain works- you forget; But this is how you must also be thinking: Every mark counts.

Part B

So why does revision seem so simple, yet everyone fails to do it?

There’s a few factors:

1. With 19 subjects to manage, when studying a subject itself is your main focus, you tend to not give time for anything else other than gaining in new knowledge, and reading more text. So revision takes a backseat, and you won’t do it with an excuse called “I have no time”.
2. You have not considered that the above concept in Part A of “forgetting” easily gets compounded and you’ll forget much much more over 2–3 months of break after a first reading- which is like almost starting back from zero.

So you have to atleast squeeze in revision as frequently as you can manage. Learning new points of a subject should be balanced with revising those points immediately within a few weeks. That should be your strategy and not just reading a subject.

What you do not revise- you’ll forget, and it’s as same as not reading anything in the first place. You want to be reading to maximise your potential to remember, recall and answer MCQs, NOT just because you think you should read more and you’ll be able to tackle more MCQs. More reading does not equal more recall- since you’d have forgotten it all in a week.

In the same gist, it makes no sense to do ALL resources that you find on the internet. I’ve had these temptations, and that feeling of “losing an opportunity” if I dont read ‘x’, but you HAVE to learn to say NO!

Because you HAVE to give time to revise, as that’ll how you’s remember, and that’s how you’ll score.

I’ll repeat that again- just as you make time to read “new” topics and subject matter, you also HAVE to balance and make time to revise the same while essentially saying no to “reading more” at the cost of revising.

Don’t compromise revision.

Part C

Given these together, THEN try to increase your reading width.

That’s how you’ll score: Your combined (Read + Revision) score at what you read. Higher this combined study, higher your retention and recall, better results you’ll notice over the long term.

Even though this will seem counterintuitive at first (to not read everything that you come across), you’ll see results as your rank improves in SWTs over the months, and especially your recall in the last months when you’ve cumulatively read AND revised much more in fact.

I’ve explained my schedule for how I did this in a previous article.

{This article is a part of the CostaPG publication.}