Valentine's Day wishes to all readers! :)
Well well... I am stopping with the greeting. (Leave me from that topic! :D )
GATE exam happened on February 12th (Offline exams) this year and it seems there's a record 7.8 lakh people took GATE this year! Quite a phenomenal number that! Much of the number is due to the consideration of GATE score for recruitment in public sector companies. Not all people want to do the so-called (and of course, dreaded) 'higher studies'! :)
B.Tech itself was cumbersome! No need to say anything about M.Tech! 2 more years of the same branch??? No way!
I also wrote GATE. No kidding, Yes, I really wrote.
I went to the Exam Centre armed with 2 Black pens, 2 Blue pens, a pencil, a calculator and an eraser. For ID proof, my college Id. Of course, my mobile phone too! THAT WAS ALL! I was really amazed to see so much people preparing even at 8.30 AM (the exam starts at 9AM)! Some of them had come with parents. They had food and water bottles for their 'children' - I wondered if they were going for a wrestling match! :D
Embarrassing, anyway, I walked straight up and found out my exam hall. One good thing about being a chess player is that, we find a chess player wherever we go. (Atleast one person! No escape!) Here too, I found my friend Haribalu eagerly checking the notice board!
Coming to the main part, I went to my exam hall at around 8.45 AM. As a surprise, the invigilator was also known to me - she was a chess player's mother!
"Wherever we go, I don't know if Hutch and Vodafone follow; definitely Chess follows!"
As bad luck (or good luck) would have it, I was seated in the very first bench! Oh my god, the very thought of she looking at my answering made me laugh inside! I knew very well... I could answer only the last ten questions. (We prepared in VIT two days back with a GATE mock question paper. Nothing much to say, the mock paper humbled me! :D)
One bad thing about GATE exam compared to SRM Semester exams is that, we cannot leave the hall until the exam gets over. This meant that I had to sit in the same place for 3 hours...
1st 30 minutes - I solved the aptitude and English questions - fairly easy.
I looked at my watch - 9.30 AM :( 150 minutes remained... Fate - cell phones are not allowed. My thoughts went to VIT where the South Zone Inter Universities was still going on. This is the worst thing that happened in the exam hall, I will tell you why - I dozed off at 9.40! Due to 4 years of sleeping experience in SRM, I knew perfectly how to sleep in a classroom but this was different. Unconsciously, I shaded another bubble with 'black ink ball point pen' (this was the only color allowed in GATE)! To my horror, I found that I had already answered that question!
Phir melinge!
Well well... I am stopping with the greeting. (Leave me from that topic! :D )
GATE exam happened on February 12th (Offline exams) this year and it seems there's a record 7.8 lakh people took GATE this year! Quite a phenomenal number that! Much of the number is due to the consideration of GATE score for recruitment in public sector companies. Not all people want to do the so-called (and of course, dreaded) 'higher studies'! :)
B.Tech itself was cumbersome! No need to say anything about M.Tech! 2 more years of the same branch??? No way!
I also wrote GATE. No kidding, Yes, I really wrote.
I went to the Exam Centre armed with 2 Black pens, 2 Blue pens, a pencil, a calculator and an eraser. For ID proof, my college Id. Of course, my mobile phone too! THAT WAS ALL! I was really amazed to see so much people preparing even at 8.30 AM (the exam starts at 9AM)! Some of them had come with parents. They had food and water bottles for their 'children' - I wondered if they were going for a wrestling match! :D
Embarrassing, anyway, I walked straight up and found out my exam hall. One good thing about being a chess player is that, we find a chess player wherever we go. (Atleast one person! No escape!) Here too, I found my friend Haribalu eagerly checking the notice board!
Coming to the main part, I went to my exam hall at around 8.45 AM. As a surprise, the invigilator was also known to me - she was a chess player's mother!
"Wherever we go, I don't know if Hutch and Vodafone follow; definitely Chess follows!"
As bad luck (or good luck) would have it, I was seated in the very first bench! Oh my god, the very thought of she looking at my answering made me laugh inside! I knew very well... I could answer only the last ten questions. (We prepared in VIT two days back with a GATE mock question paper. Nothing much to say, the mock paper humbled me! :D)
One bad thing about GATE exam compared to SRM Semester exams is that, we cannot leave the hall until the exam gets over. This meant that I had to sit in the same place for 3 hours...
1st 30 minutes - I solved the aptitude and English questions - fairly easy.
I looked at my watch - 9.30 AM :( 150 minutes remained... Fate - cell phones are not allowed. My thoughts went to VIT where the South Zone Inter Universities was still going on. This is the worst thing that happened in the exam hall, I will tell you why - I dozed off at 9.40! Due to 4 years of sleeping experience in SRM, I knew perfectly how to sleep in a classroom but this was different. Unconsciously, I shaded another bubble with 'black ink ball point pen' (this was the only color allowed in GATE)! To my horror, I found that I had already answered that question!
"தூக்கம் கலைந்தது!" (I woke up!)
"The forehead-sweating feeling when you wake up suddenly after a sleep-in-sitting-position is very annoying! You get scared if something has gone wrong - you look around to see if someone caught you sleeping; look what others are doing and later... realize that everything is fine!"
The instructions in GATE paper read something like this ... "Use only black ink ball point pen since it cannot be erased. Hence the candidate must shade the bubbles carefully"
Yeah... Right! They cannot be erased I thought. Then my thoughts went back to something I read when I was young... er... a school-goer!
"In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins...
Not through strength, but through persistence!"
| What an Idea! :) |
I took out the eraser and started erasing. Initially it did not make any difference. I looked at my watch. "Hell with it, I said to myself. I will keep erasing - I have so much time all the same"! I continued erasing. After ten minutes, some part of the bubble disappeared. And with it, some portion of the top layer of the extra thick ORS sheet. (The usual shading sheet, nothing alien). I continued with the most productive work I did in the exam. After 25 minutes, the whole bubble was erased. I was very very happy at what I had done. Now the question had only one answer. (The IIT people got it wrong - it can be erased! Yaar kitta!!! Tamizhan da!)
Thoroughly elated at my endeavour, I finally gained some motivation to read the technical questions. And how well I did, I managed to answer a few questions and make some intelligent guesses for the others. I also mustered enough tolerance to stop myself from shading answers for all questions - there is negative marking in GATE! I had answered 49 questions out of 65!
And then I answered two more. I crossed 50 and kept my answer count at 51!
There was still some 30 minutes left and I had to sit idle. There was nothing else left for me to do. The other questions were unanswerable to my standards. My knowledge in CS & IT is very limited. As one significant person enlightened me recently, I just "Did what made me happy and left the rest to God!"
p.s. These stunts are performed by professionals. Don't try this in any competitive exam! Prepare in advance!
Phir melinge!
ak :)
