STAGE I: Written Examination

Almost every company that comes to the colleges, holds a written examination which you can say as the preliminary stage for selecting a handful of students and proceed them to the next stage.

To all the students, I will recommend you to start preparing for your written examination before hand, to avoid getting frustrated during the period of the placement drives. Start preparing according to the following steps:

QUANTITATIVE APTITUDE

STEP 1) Complete RS AGARWAL for Aptitude. The main chapters that usually come in the written examination of almost every company are:

• Time and Work
• Pipes and Cistern
• Permutations and Combinations
• Probability
• Profit and Loss
• Compound Interest
• Average
• Problems on Ages
• Set Theory (Usually problems with Venn Diagrams)
• Time and Distance (Usually problems with relative speed. For example, problems like two trains moving in the same direction with different speeds, cross a car moving at a speed of X kmph , etc...)

STEP 2) After finishing almost every sum from every topic in RS AGARWAL, go for Quantitative Aptitude by Arun Sharma or Arihant Publications (Yellow Book).

STEP 3) Start practicing sums from websites like m4maths.com, indiabix.com, freshersworld.com.
   
Remember, Practicing sums only from RS AGARWAL is not at all ENOUGH. You can only use that book for brushing up your knowledge that you gained from school.

STEP 4) After practising sums from the above mentioned websites, start giving online tests in indiabix.com and other websites if you can find. Attend as much as online tests as you can, especially the ones with time limits. This will help you in further brushing up your quantitative skills and will thereby increase your speed. 

STEP 5) Return to RS AGARWAL again. Keep your watch on the desk. Set a timer, say 45 mins for 30 sums initially and then gradually decrease the time limit upto 1 minute per sum, when you get well aquianted with your speed. Start solving the sums from a chapter, within the stipulated time that you had set for yourself.

N.B.: Please be strict with yourself. If the timer buzzes after the time is over, immediately put the pen down no matter how much problems are still left to do. 

Take a red pen and mark the correct answers. After calculating the same, write the marks that you have obtained out of the total sums. This will help you to analyze your current progress in that particular chapter.

Repeat the same for all the chapters.

ENGLISH

STEP 1) Start reading and solving problems from the book Objective English by Edgar Thorpe and S. Thorpe, from Pearson Publications (Black Cover). Friends, please believe me, it is really an awesome book. The speciality of this book is that it is a book for all kinds of students, right from a person who doesn't know even the 'E' of English to the person who is a Shakespeare in English.

Start brushing up your grammatical skills at first before moving on to the vocabulary part. The most common mistake made by the students is that they straight away jump to memorize the vocabulary part before checking on their grammatical skills.

The main chapters that you should focus on at first are:

• Preposition
• Tense
• Active Voice and Passive Voice
• Direct and Indirect Speech
• Conjunctions

STEP 2) Now the main part comes i.e, Vocabulary. It is generally required for solving the questions related to antonyms and synonyms. Now the matter of truth is that, no person in this world can memorize the whole vocabulary within two or three months. I shall therefore advise you to start reading newspapers, magazines, novels (specially written by foreign authors), watch hollywood movies and listen to the dialogues carefully and the new words that the actors use. Not only you should listen to the dialogues, but also carefully observe how they pronounce each and every word in their dialogues. 

STEP 3) Start going through the book, Word Power Made Easy( Red thick book). You can also find a good set of vocabulary in Objective English, that I have mentioned in the previous step.

Make a separate notebook which will consist of only set of new words and their meaning that you have learned.

STEP 4) After getting well acquianted with your vocabulary skills, start with Reading Comprehension (RC). Remember, this is the most important section next to Vocabulary and it is time consuming too. So you need to complete the rest of the questions at first quickly in order to save time for RCs during online written exams.
Practice as much as RCs as you can. This will help you in gaining your reading speed.

Remember: Never make extra assumptions on your own in case of RCs. Always try to stick to whatever given in the passage. 

STEP 5) Start giving online tests on various websites like indiabix.com etc...

LOGICAL REASONING(LR) AND DATA INTERPRETATION(DI)

STEP 1) For DI part, I shall recommend you to start from Arun Sharma instead of RS Agarwal. The techniques used in that book is extremely useful and understandable.

DI is generally the easiest topic yet it has very length calculations. So, to get rid of that, use tutorials from the YouTube, where many shortcuts method for DI have been shown. 

In written exams, the topics that mainly come from DI are the Bar Charts and the Pie Charts.

Please do not forget to solve sums having mixed charts, or data within data. 

STEP 2) Start solving DI Problems from online websites like indiabix.com etc...

STEP 3) For the LR part, start solving problems from Verbal Reasoning by RS Agarwal. Observe each and every technique used to solve problems from various sub topics in every chapter and make notes of them in a separate notebook.

After you finish off with that try solving problems from Arun Sharma. 

For details of how to solve some of the problems from LR and various other chapters including english and quants, kindly wait for the next post. I will be discussing there some short cut tricks for the same.
--Written and Developed by   Souvik Majumder