A Lesson in Test Taking

Do you know why young Ashwathama, despite being a keen learner and son of Dronacharya himself, was not considered the best student by his father? Ashwathama didn't either, and thus one day asked his father the same. That day, Dronacharya, during the day's tutelage, arranged for an exercise where all students were told that a dummy bird placed on a tree was their target. Each student was asked to aim his arrow at the bird, and while the student was ready to shoot, Dronacharya asked the student what he could see. Some said they could see the surroundings, some said they could see the tree and the bird, some, perhaps to impress their teacher, said they could see just Dronacharya's feet. On his turn, Arjun said that he could see only the eye of the bird and nothing else! A delighted Dronacharya then explained to the students that an archer should have his eyes and mind set only on the target before him and nothing else. This not just answered (and embarrassed) Ashwathama’s question but also has a valuable lesson for us taking monitored or unmonitored tests in the run up to November 28.

A lot of you would have been taking online tests, which are well-designed to prepare you for all eventualities on D day, and I hope that you continue to do so systematically for next couple of months. However, I have observed that while taking these tests, some of you get distracted at the slightest movement or noise, sometimes by something as mundane and frequent as the opening of a door, dropping of a pen or displacement of a nearby chair. Though my observation is limited to a few students I have observed, my guess is that the same would be true for many of us. As someone who has taken CAT seven times, I can assure you that such disturbances are very much a part of the actual CAT experience as well, where people move around to invigilate, students leave the test lab to make a hurried visit to washroom and test takers put their queries to the nearby personnel, sometimes not so quietly. In one bizarre incident a few years back, a girl sitting next to me started crying during the test! Did I mention that she was very pretty!!!

If you continue getting swayed by every movement that takes place around you and every sound that falls on your ears, you would not just waste your precious time, but also lose concentration each time your mind wanders to any of it. The only way to overcome such physical (and even mental) distractions is to be totally immersed in your computer screen with an unbreakable focus and be mindful of only what is there on that screen, as if the rest of the world around you doesn’t exist. Nothing that happens in the test room should be able to shatter that Adamantium wall of your unyielding focus. Be as focussed as you are while revising and studying 10 minutes before you enter the examination hall, when all the chaos around you seems to disappear! That is the kind of concentration that you must aspire for. It will not come in a day or even a week, but your conscious efforts in pursuing it will get you closer each time, and by the time it is November the 28th, you will be Arjun with his eyes fixed just on the bird’s eye, and all else invisible! You can rest assured that in case fire breaks out in the building, your concentration would by itself get disturbed by the ensuing pandemonium. But anything less should not catch your attention :-) The writer in me somehow gets a massive erection if I am awake beyond 2 am, and though, on most nights, what I write has nothing to do with pedagogy, somehow the observation I made today propelled me to write the above. All tests and questions have to be analysed after attempting. How to do that? Read my article on test analysis here: https://lokeshlogan.blogspot.com/2020/08/analyse-your-test-well.html Keep checking this space! All the best for the road ahead!

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