How to have fun and still ace the board exams — a practical approach.
School — people call it the temple of knowledge and the house of learning. It is where the mind is enlightened and where a perspective is created. A school is a home away from home for any student and it hasn’t been an exception for me. Many claim to have had a ‘standard’ learning experience at their school, but mine was anything but standard. My experience at Vishwajyot was filled with the most vibrant and dynamic experiences I could have ever hoped for.
There are many stories I could tell you about the years that I spent at Vishwajyot, but in this article I want to give you my top 5 tips for preparing and acing the 10th board exams.
Students often only associate grade 10 with the board examination that happens at the end of the year. Many enter grade 10 with a feeling of apprehension or fear. But my ingress into this crucial year was very different from what others may have experienced. I was filled to the brim with excitement to take on the 10th grade, because this was going to be my year.
“Students nowadays look upon the boards as an abhorrent, menacing and torturous curse that has befallen them. Its all just an exaggeration.”
I knew from the beginning that the board examination was nothing but a regular final examination with an inflated head and a menacing visage. Students nowadays look upon the boards as an abhorrent, menacing and torturous curse that has befallen them. Its all just an exaggeration. I knew that grade 10 was simply grade 9, just with a hint of expectations and a dash of pressure. So I entered the year with a will to give it everything that I had in myself. Looking back now, I am really glad that I did so.
Students take on different strategies to attempt the boards and score maximum marks. I too had my own unique strategy, which I am going to share with you today. This strategy helped me ace the boards, and I hope you will find it useful.
1) Pay attention in the class
It seems like a very common and simple thing to do, but you will be surprised to find out how many students, my friends included, unconsciously fail to follow this simple advice. Paying attention in the class does not only mean taking down notes religiously and hearing every single word that the teacher utters. As a matter of fact, I never took notes during classes, except for a few occasional ones. Paying attention in the class means something different. It means truly getting involved with the topic being taught and asking the right questions wherever required. It means diving deep into the topic and making sure that you understand the intricacies of it.
2) Learn the tricks
Keep you eyes and ears open in class, because the way a teacher teaches something is usually the best trick to understand and remember it for your examination. Consciously looking for these cues really helps in the preparation for boards. For example, when a teacher is teaching the structure of the heart, she will describe the flow of the blood through different parts of the heart and will keep naming the parts as she goes on explaining the blood flow.
You may notice that in textbooks, it is usually not so. They begin with naming the parts first and then go on to talk about the blood flow. It is always best to learn any new idea conceptually first before diving into the theoretical aspect of it.
“It is extremely surprising that teachers give away so many tips and tricks in the class to tackle the boards and yet students clamour asking for methods to learn different concepts. If you want the most efficient ways, keep your eyes and ears open!”
3) Find your Fit
Experiment and try out different ways to practice and prepare for the boards many months in advance. This will help you know yourself better and will help you prepare the most efficient strategy for yourself. There is no point in blindly following a strategy which was prepared by a random person, which is being followed by thousands of people. You need to find your own unique fit. And the way to do so is through practice, lots and lots of it! You know yourself the best and therefore only you can find your own best fit to achieve your goals.
This exercise made me realize that I could never stick to a timetable as I kept breaking it, but I realized that my strength lay in the fact that I could sit down and work on things for many hours at a stretch, without significant exhaustion.
4) Practice and Analyze
I had the practice of preparing for any particular chapter as if I was going to appear for its exam. Once I was through with reading, I would actually attempt the questions given by teachers as if they were actual exam questions. This ensured that I knew the chapters very thoroughly before I even started to prepare for actual exams.
Most students dread prelims. Prelims exist for you to not only gauge your current skills, but to also improve on them. My success in the boards can be heavily attributed to the astounding number of prelims I had attempted for practice.
“By the end of my preparation, I must have attempted over 15 full length prelims covering all the 10 subjects. That makes it about 150 exams. This was the main reason why I could do so well.”
Analysis of your answers is very crucial, as after 15 prelims you would have covered almost every question that can possibly be asked in the boards. The marks that show up on your answer sheets don’t matter as much as the mistakes. The errors that you make in your prelims are far more valuable, because they are the ones that fetch you extra marks in your board. So make sure that you find your mistakes, analyze and rectify them. We followed an answer sheet tagging system at Vishwajyot that helped us identify the topics that we were good at and the ones that we needed more practice on, after every prelim that we appeared for. It was a boon to have been introduced to it.
5) Don’t miss out on having fun!
Students are always concerned about creating a balance between their studies and having fun. According to me, this should not be a problem at all. It simply depends on the goals that a student wants to achieve. And for that matter if a student wants to achieve a very high goal, it does not mean that she should not have fun. Remember that there is no direct relationship between having fun and scoring poor grades.
I like to think that I enjoyed and had fun almost throughout the year. The best trick has been to focus completely on studying for the required time and then having fun unapologetically. I used to finish all my work within the first one and half hour of getting back home, and then I would do whatever pleased me. You need to figure out this balance for yourself, as it is unique to each one of us.
Finally, here’s what I would like to say to the students who have just moved into the 10th grade:
The board exam is nothing to be scared of, it is just like any other exam. In fact, it’s easier as the board exam is the only exam where every single question is predictable as it comes from a set source, your textbook. Know your strengths and set challenging, yet achievable goals. Don’t forget to enjoy the pauses given to you and cherish the entire experience as a whole. Understand the fact that academic excellence and extra-curricular talent are not mutually exclusive, but they go hand in hand.
In this context, the persona of Leonardo Da Vinci never fails to amaze me. He was a geologist, botanist, biologist, anatomy expert, polymath, scientist, artist, sculptor, writer, poet and great thinker — all at the very same time. Let us never limit ourselves by our rigid mindset. Remember that it is not the boards which shall define your journey through grade 10, but how you take on grade 10 and approach the game which shall define the journey.
Wish you all the very best!
