How We Lose Time During Examination- A Crucial Factor For GAMSAT Candidates

I often walk down memory lane to the good, old school days. However, the one thing which have always annoyed me is how foolish I was to waste crucial minutes during school and college examinations. I guess every grown up man has faced the same feeling when he/ she thinks about them. Actually, in GAMSAT we lose about 30 minutes, minimum, just doing nothing. Can you just believe this fact? If not, let me show how it actually happens.

Just think about the particular day of GAMSAT. In the morning we are already quite tensed and high on adrenaline when we leave for the examination centre. After reaching the centre about half an hour before the official entry permit, we sit somewhere trying to recollect on every possible chapters, topics, questions etc. At this stage, though, our mind is very active but due to no physical activity our reflex actions get minimised. Then, after the entry bell strikes, we hurry into the test centre and sit on our respective seats and wait anxiously for the examiner to arrive. Believe me, this is the most boring as well as depressing period of the GAMSAT test day. It is just like, you are hung up in the air and not being able to land on the ground. Your mental concentration breaks considerably during this period. In addition, a comment from other fellow aspirants which comes to your ears also distracts your attention. Then comes the BIG moment- when the examiner distributes the GAMSAT questionnaires to the candidates. As soon as you get the question paper, your natural instinct will be to go through the paper and to mark the questions which you feel comfortable enough to start with.

But the irony is, no matter how much you try to set up your normal pace and start answering, the output will be much less than your expectation. It is because your concentration level is at the bottom at this moment. With time the level increases to the optimum, respective to individual candidates. You can look into the graph, given below, for a detailed understanding.

During this log-stage, you will be doing much less work than you normally achieve in standard conditions.

Once the optimum concentration level is reached, you will be answering the questions in your standard pace.

Now, during the last 30 minutes of GAMSAT, you generally feel a peculiar suspicion about your work till then. It may be about the correctness of the answer you have marked or about the correct choice of alternatives in multiple choice questions or even about any spelling and grammar mistake in vocabulary section. These thoughts decrease your attention span and distract you with unimportant stuff. As a result, much less work is done than what should have been in the ideal environment (Please refer to the graph given above).

In this article, I have tried to point out the various factors contributing to time-loss during GAMSAT. I hope my points will prove useful to young aspirants who, in turn, will think about these loopholes during their next GAMSAT.