English Speaking and CBSE/ICSE Board Exams

ANALYTICS: THE RIGHT WAY OF TEST PREPARATION

2010-12-14T03:10:00.000-08:00

Rajan started preparing for CAT right from his second year of B-Tech. By the time he reached his final year, he found that an early start had given him a definite edge over others who had started their preparation in the third year or the final year. He was confident that he would get through.

The D-day came and he attempted very well as he usually did. When the result card declared that he had scored 85 percentile, he found it hard to digest. Where did Rajan go wrong? Why couldn’t he get through to the IIMs even though he was intelligent and had worked hard towards his goal?

Many scholars share Rajan’s problem. They fail to understand that competition is not about ‘how smart you are’ but about ‘how smarter than the others’. What Rajan’s preparation lacked was benchmarking against others, including the best, and continuous, monitored improvement. Rajan knew the areas he was good at, but he didn’t know how much input he needed to put in and where. He thought he was best among his immediate peers, but he failed to reckon with the best across the nation.

You surely don’t want to be another Rajan. Do you? So, read on.

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking in test prep refers to monitoring your competitors and understanding your relative position among the test takers. This helps you in understanding your current level of preparation and additional effort required to improve your competitive positioning. Benchmarking should always be followed by remedial action and identification of improvement areas for arriving at action points.

Benchmarking can be broadly classified into three categories

-benchmarking with self

This is particularly helpful in qualifying exams and for improvement in a particular subject area. Here the focus is not on competition but on self-improvement. The aim is to continually identify and remove weak areas to reach the desired level of proficiency. After reviewing every test, you analyze in detail, the sub skills where your score is low. You work on these sub-skills and take subsequent tests to see how your score has improved. You may also take a test specifically of the sub skills where you scored low. Therefore, the improvement happens in progressive iterations until a desired level of scoring is achieved.

-benchmarking in a group

Here a student identifies a small group against which he would like to benchmark himself. Usually this group would be of a similar profile as the candidate himself. The candidate first excels in this group and chooses progressively larger groups subsequently.

-benchmarking nationally

Students who are appearing in National competitive exams like CAT, IIT JEE, PMT, GATE, UPSC etc, adopt national benchmarking. Here a test taker compares himself with his peers throughout the nation and then focuses strategically on maximizing his overall score by working on his weaknesses and reinforcing his strengths.

How is Benchmarking done?

paper pencil based mock test

This can be a very good tool to assess one’s competitive positioning in the nation after completion of one’s preparation. The nature of the assessment being summative, this is kind of a final judgment on one’s preparation rather than a tool of improvement.

However, is the preparation for any competitive exam ever complete?

The reported aggregate score and a percentile rank leave little scope for any analyses of topics for areas of improvement. Also, since the student base is from the test conducting institute only, the data is not true representative and any inference drawn is biased.

online mock test

Online mock tests present a more detailed analysis of test performance. The student can easily see the areas where he needs to improve. However, these tests stop at that, and seldom provide the user with the tools for improvement. Since a user would require tests in many different formats for further improvement, these tests are a one time affair and leave the user high and dry, gasping for improvement.

Besides, the scores and analyses are reliable and statistically valid only if these tests enjoy the patronage of a significant number of students.

analytics way: the right way

There are very few analytic engines worth their salt in the online space. TCYonline.com is the leader. TCY Analytics* gives the user a number of interesting advantages:

- Flexibility to use any type of benchmarking refereed to earlier

- A large student base of approx 1 million (& counting) gives considerable statistical advantage

- 23 million TCY Analytics* (question attempts) & counting

- Automatically suggests improvement areas and action points

- Generates tests to specifically improve identified weak areas

- Picks suggested video tutorials based on your test performance

- Gathers information around each question through student and author discussions

*TCY Analytics: Question attempts where each question has data of each candidate who attempted it, around parameters like time taken on question, gender, age, city, stream ( B.Com, B.Tech, BBA etc)

This data gives students:

A. Comparative benchmarking like:

National benchmarking: National ranking & percentiles for each test

Comparison with top ten : Your performance with national toppers

Comparison with Friends/Groups/Classmates: Your performance with your chosen friends

Customized Comparison: City-wise, state-wise, stream-wise comparison reports

B. Recommendations like:

Your weak areas and recommended tests to overcome these weak areas

C . Self Assessment:

Overall Performance till date: Your performance trends test by test

Topic-wise Analysis till date: A cumulative topic wise analysis of your tests

View Overall Analysis : Which questions you have marked correct/wrong

Question by Question Analysis: The answer to each question and discussion with others

Topic-wise Analysis: Your sub-sub-sub skills to improve faster and your BEST & WEAK topics in the test

Difficulty-wise Analysis: How well you performed on difficult questions

Your Time Management: Know your Time Savers & Time Takers in the test, based on average time per question

What makes TCY-Analytics unique is that hundreds of authors spread all over the world upload thousands of quality tests. It is like a textbook in which each chapter is written by the best expert in that area. Each question is rated and the junk is automatically removed from the site, giving users the best content quality experience.

For our school going K-10 friends, we have a highly effective assessment test called National Benchmarking Test, for students in grades 6 to 10. TCY -NBT is a test of its kind! It is unique as it combines a comprehensive assessment test with a plan of remedial action to overcome the weaknesses it identifies, and further with a career preparedness graph to guide a student on the career options available as per his existing skill levels. What is more, the Analytics of TCY-NBT also provides detailed statistics on his competitiveness at the national, state, regional and school levels.

If you have a testing history on TCYonline, it is mapping your different competencies more and more accurately with every subsequent test. Start early; maintain regularity for us to recommend to you various career options, based on your competencies, throughout your student and working life. Remember, ever increasing portfolio of test categories on TCYonline will give you tests that help you decide career paths. Keep visiting TCYonline more and more often for more and more tests and keep growing intellectually all your life.

Test Preparation without TCY Analytics is incomplete.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome!

Kamal Wadhera along with Viji Raj

CAT 2010 Solutions Key

2010-10-26T22:24:00.000-07:00

Cat 2010 Analysis: Share your Views

Feeling tensed about the Online CAT Format that gave blues to test takers in 2009? CAT has always lived up to its reputation of springing a surprise every year in one aspect or the other. So, what is in store for you in CAT 2010?

Worry no longer!

Share all your apprehensions and experiences with your peers through us. Your experience may allay somebody else’s apprehensions and vice versa.

You may also count on getting valuable tips and CAT analysis from experts. Share CAT 2010 analysis and expert opinion on CAT cutoffs on this site. You may also send your queries/comments with regard to the difficulty level of questions vis-à-vis that of the questions in the paper based tests of 2007, 2008. CAT 2009 questions were generally simpler than CAT questions 2007 and 2008. Did the CAT 2009 trend continue or CAT 2010 was more like CAT 2007/2008?

Send your notes, comments, differences of opinion to TCYonline.com

Disclaimer: Sorry! We cannot provide you CAT 2010 answer key. The original CAT 2010 questions are protected by the Confidentiality Agreement. Make sure that no original CAT questions are discussed on this site that might jeopardize the Confidentiality Agreement that you and our experts signed at the time of the test.

http://www.tcyonline.com/exam-analysis/cat-2010-solutions

CAT 2010 Tips

2010-10-14T00:11:00.001-07:00

CAT 2010 aspirants are moving to the second phase. Yes!! the second phase is self analyze. Students who are going to appear in CAT 2010 have been covered first phase. To analyze yourself you must have to solve CAT Practice Papers, Sample Papers, Previous Papers so that you can recover your weak areas. Student should do self analysis and try to improve day by day so start taking Mock CAT Tests. TCYonline.com provides Free CAT Mock Test and Sectional Tests. You need to check your speed to attempt CAT Exam. If your speed is very slow then you must have to do practice. Improve your concentration so that you can attempt your exam in proper time.

You must have to identify your strength and weaknesses so that you can use them in you exam time. Make a table of strength and weak areas and try to improve them by focusing more. TCYanalytics is one of the best tool that helps to analyze that how much you have prepared and in which areas you are lacking. Recover weaknesses by giving more time to weak areas and less time to strength. You must remember that it is not necessary to answer all the questions, but you must pick up the right questions in your expertise area and solve them. Careful when you are selecting the questions because there is negative marking in CAT Exam. You must have to attempt maximum number of correct answers.

Try to appear in CAT Mock Tests as it is really helpful and good for your progress. To crack CAT Exam you must be good in Group Discussion for GD, read newspapers, magazines and books. So manage one hour for reading newspapers and magazines. Get in touch with current affairs.

You should think of scoring as much as possible, take benefits of TCYonline by accessing Challenge Zone, Quiz Zone as this is the interesting and effective part of Online Test Preparation.

Good Luck!!

CAT 2010 D.I Strategies

2010-09-03T05:29:00.000-07:00

Data Interpretation consists of three sections viz. Data Interpretation, Data Sufficiency and Reasoning. It is easily the most scoring section of any exam- if the fundamentals are in place.

Data Interpretation (D.I.) : contains information presented in the form of Bar graphs, Line Graphs, Pie Charts, Tables, Histograms etc. The student is required to analyze the information provided and supply the answer to asked queries related to the data given. Students who are good at heavy mental calculation are at an advantage as it is one of the keys for doing well in this section. This section tests the students' skills in Percentage calculation, Profit and Loss Analysis, and Ratio Proportion.

Data Sufficiency: is a section where a statement is given and with it are provided two options which could hold the key to the answer. The student is required to independently analyze both the answer keys and see from which the answer can be derived. The student has to tick one of the five options for the answer.

• If answer can be derived from Answer key A- then answer is A.

• If answer can be derived from Answer key B- then answer is B.

• If answer can be derived from both A & B independently- then answer will be C.

• If answer can be derived from a combination of A & B- then answer is D.

• If answer cannot be derived from any of the options, then the answer is E.

Imp: Many times students get confused when the solution does yield an answer with both the answer keys but the answer is different in both the cases. In such a scenario, C would be the correct option is the right one as long as both the options provide unique answers (i.e. it can't be -2 or +2, it has to be either).

Reasoning: as a section can be tackled very well if the mental calculation is fast. There are broadly three types of reasoning questions: Linear, Circular and Tabular.

To Prepare for CAT 2010 you can get complete study material consists Notes, CAT Test Papers, CAT Practice Papers CAT Sample Papers CAT Previous Papers online. Visit the links given below to prepare for CAT 2010.

CAT
CAT 2010
CAT Quants
CAT Mock Test
CAT Test Paper
CAT Practice Papers

NIMCET 2010 MCA Answer Key

2010-05-14T22:12:00.001-07:00

NIMCET-2010 will be held pan India on Sunday, the 16th of May. Lacs of students will be appearing for NIMCET-2010 and vying for about 500 seats in 11 campuses that offer the MCA degree. Subject experts at TCY will be giving a NIMCET-2010 MCA Solutions on their website, www.TCYonline.com. The experts will analyze the pattern of NIMCET MCA 2010, toughness level and expected cut-off mark. Students can Check NIMCET MCA 2010 Answer Keys.

Subject to timely acquirement of NIMCET-2010 Question paper, Subject experts at TCY will also give the solutions/ answer keys to NIMCET-2010 question paper. NIMCET-2010 MCA Solution Key exam are expected to be available by 4.00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. Students all over India, with the help of the detailed analysis of NIMCET-2010, along with the expected cut off and NIMCET-2010 MCA Answer Keys for exam will be able to find if they stand a chance of making it to the selection zone.

AIEEE 2010 Solutions Key | AIEEE 2010 Answer

2010-04-24T04:48:00.000-07:00

All India Engineering Entrance Exam- 2010, popularly known as AIEEE 2010, will be held across the nation on Sunday, the 25th of April. Lacs of aspirants will be participating in the prestigious test. After the test, the most important sought after information will be the AIEEE 2010 answer keys. Students will want to know how well they did and AIEEE 2010 solution keys will be the moist searched key phrase on the net.

Subject experts at www.TCYonline.com, India’s largest online test prep platform, will be solving the test paper and hosting the AIEEE 2010 solution keys on the website. Students wanting to check AIEEE answers can find them on www.TCYonline.com latest by 7 p.m. of the same day as the test. Students will find AIEEE 2010 Physics solutions, AIEEE 2010 Chemistry solutions and AIEEE 2010 Math solutions.

Students from across the nation can also participate in ‘AIEEE Questions Discussion’ on the website. They can also leave their queries on the website and the experts at TCY will revert back with the answers within a short time.

Unlimited free AIEEE 2010 Mock Tests are also available in the tests section on www.TCYonline.com. Aspirants can do last minute revision and hone their skills for the upcoming test. They can also target self improvement by using TCY Analytics to analyse their attempt pattern, time taken on each question, sub topic and topic wise analysis of strengths and weaknesses. ‘Expert Recommendation’ from TCY Analytics will also automatically generate tests for students from their weak areas as well as from wrongly attempted and un-attempted questions. The ‘Test Generator’ tool will also assist students by generating customized test papers for them. Enrolled students can use TCY Analytics to benchmark their performance against a select group and also against students from across the country. This will also give them a reasonable idea of their level of preparation for AIEEE 2010.

Click the Below Links for Detail Analysis and Solutions Key:

Get your “CBSE Class X Math Solution” on 11th March itself!!

2010-03-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

CBSE class X students all over India will appear for their Mathematics board exam on the 11^th of March and will know the result on the same evening. TCY, India’s premier ‘Education Services Company’ will share the complete solutions of the CBSE Math question paper on 11^th March, 2010 evening. The solutions will be made available on steps.TCYonline.com initially, followed by a printed version in one of the leading newspaper in the state the next day.

Wherever different question papers are used, students will just need to log onto steps.TCYonline.com and click on the link for their geographical location to see the solved question papers. Another free service being provided by TCY is the facility of CBSE Math Mock Tests that will be on the website. As the students will be taking the exam for local language on the 8^th of March, they will have two and half days to revise their Math syllabus. The students will be able to utilize this time well by attempting CBSE Pattern Mock Tests on the website. The mock tests will be followed by a detailed analysis and explanations by TCYonline experts.

TCY unveils ‘Lifelong Royalty’ for teachers

2010-02-19T23:03:00.000-08:00

Educationists across the nation have a reason to rejoice. TCY, India’s largest online testing platform, with over 7, 50, 000 students from over 1500 cities enrolled, has come out with an innovative programme that can become the source of lifelong income for teachers. Starting today, teachers from across India can log onto TCY’s web portal and start uploading questions for students. They have the choice of selecting a topic from more than fifty categories of tests ranging from class 3rd to UPSC exams. Apart from an initial payment for uploading an original test, teachers will continue to earn ‘Royalty Income’ every time a student attempts the test. A teacher starts earning from the moment a single test is uploaded unlike the offline model of publishing, where an author has to write a complete book to be published and earn money. Talking about the event, Rajesh Wadhera, Director of TCY said, “Through this initiative, we plan to empower 1000 teachers to become nationally acclaimed authors. A teacher can participate in the programme while sitting at home; the process of uploading tests is so simple that anyone with a working knowledge of computers can do it without assistance. In the offline publishing era, a few authors took the initiative and became nationally renowned names. At the break of dawn of the online publishing era, we are offering the same opportunity to today’s teachers to become star authors of tomorrow.”

There is something called ‘staying ahead of the curve’ and it means spotting a trend or opportunity before others and making full use of it. TCY is sharing this tremendous opportunity of creating a source of life-long royalty income with the teachers. The teachers will be helping students shape their careers and in the process help secure a better future for themselves. All that teachers have to do is log onto www.TCYonline.com and they will be guided through the entire process. Talking about his experience, Nagaraja K, senior faculty at ICFAI says, “I was browsing the internet and came across TCYonline.com. I was interested to do something worthwhile online and entered as a teacher. I am happy with the objectives of online teaching, TCY categories and the layout of the website. This is definitely the new generation’s way of imparting education. I have submitted about 36 lessons so far and I love contributing to TCY in my free time.”

TCYonline.com is India’s foremost ‘Online Testing’ platform, having helped over 7, 50, 000 students from over 1500 towns and cities with their career goals. Some of the reasons TCY is a part of every student’s preparation kit are:

• TCY Analytics Engine: Over 15 million analytics to analyze performance and recommend strategy.
• Test Generator: A tool to generate customized tests to improve weak areas of students.
• Challenge Zone: To test one’s performance against students from the same students all over India.
• Largest Tagged Question Bank Anywhere.

CBSE/ICSE Board Exams

2009-11-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

One of the salient features of this annual event would be a provision for online analysis of students’ performance by TCYonline.com, the online initiative of TCY.
It is worth noting that TCYonline.com is today the Number One Testing platform in the country today with over 2.6 lakh students’ registrations on its web-portal. Hundreds of free practice tests are available on the website www.tcyonline.com for the benefit of not only CBSE students but also for other school competitions like the NTSE and Olympiads being held in the country from time to time.
Keeping in view an ‘overwhelming’ response to this initiative by this premier education institution of Northern India, TCY has decided to conduct ten such mock exercises before the final board examination in February next.
The response was so huge to this mock test that some of the students could not have on-the-spot registrations and had to go back due to the ‘limited’ seats availability.
Five top schools of the city like Sacred Heart Senior Secondary School, Tagore Public School, BCM Arya Model School, Bhartiya Vidya Mandir School and Kundan Vidya Mandir School took part in this annual exercise by ‘STEPS'.

Effective Writing Requires Effective Planning

2009-10-10T04:54:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered how an article in the newspaper or in your favorite magazine glued you to itself? Ever found yourself murmuring the words as you read your favorite poem? All of us have marveled at the beauty of words, phrases and the whole write-ups at some point in our lives. If we go deep into the writings of some of the icons and legends in literature, we find that we are not reading the text alone; we are reading the minds of the authors. There are people who pour their hearts out in their works. What comes out is the masterpiece of their writing. Be it romance or severance, satire or tragedy, fiction or fact; writings have the seed somewhere deep in the mind of the author and that is why they easily touch the reader’s heart. In the professional world, writing has become the litmus test to measure one’s skill level and proficiency in any trade. Majority of the entrance exams and the English courses and English tests worldwide have writing sections in addition to sections like reading comprehension, grammar, etc. to grade a test-taker’s ability to write. This is because writing claims a major share in the modes of communication across the globe.

The astonishing fact, however, is that people with fair skill level and good knowledge of grammar also sometimes fail to score well or communicate effectively when it comes to formal writing. Such people have the intellect and the communication skills and yet they cannot bring themselves to put the same into black and white. Wonder what else one needs to write well. Well! What they fail to consider, perhaps, is that effective writing is much more than an unstructured expression of creative ideas, and it goes well beyond usage of rich vocabulary and correct grammar.

Think before you speak, they say. Let us modify it to “think before you write”. A methodical approach towards writing results in masterpieces and makes the write-up effective and cohesive in content.

The first step, therefore, towards creative and effective writing is brainstorming for ideas pertaining to the topic or the issue on hand. The ideas need not “all” be scholarly. Let the “wild” ones also be jotted down, to start with. Screening will come later. And if it is an opinion based topic, let the ideas be jotted down separately on both sides of the divide. It does not mean that we have to contradict ourselves. Even if we hold a certain opinion, don’t we need to know the logic behind the diagonally opposite view? We might have to acknowledge our opponents, acknowledge their logic and counter it by our riposte.

The next step involves the screening; segregating the grain from the chaff. Only the best from the inspired ideas need be chosen and put in a descending order of relevance or effectiveness. By now we know what we need to discuss in how many different paragraphs. Mind you these are only the body paragraphs. We haven’t talked about the head (introduction) or the foot (conclusion) as yet.

If we have to describe the beauty of, say, a woman, what do we concentrate on, first and foremost? The face, of course! First of all it is the face that will attract attention. The same holds true for your write up. Give it an attractive face (introduction), scintillating enough to win the fancy of the reader’s eyes and mind. Well begun is half done! Let the introductory lines attract and hold the attention of the reader. Make them idiomatic if you can. Lot more thought ought to go into the phrasing of introductory lines than into the phrasing (language) of the body paragraphs or the conclusion. Perhaps we could give finishing touches to the introductory lines only after completing the rest of the write-up, by which time we are a little wiser about the topic under discussion.

Something penned down with just plain ideas often results in monotony, regardless of how good or effective the content is. A salad without dressing or a hotdog without mustard is not simply worth it. Similarly a write-up that lacks impressive references, quotes, examples fails to catch the interest of readers. Quotes, phrases, idioms etc. add to the appeal of writings and thereby increase the weight of the ideas too. Let the ideas be supported with relevant examples from the current scenario, examples that your target audience (readership) may relate to. Beware! Examples are meant to support your ideas; they are not your ideas. So, let your write-up not be cluttered with examples. Quotes, when used in the beginning or towards the ending of a write-up, work like cherry on the cake. Idioms, phrases and quotes also are a layman’s way of conveying ideas and thoughts. But once again emphasis should be laid on how much and in what manner. English spellings are important only as far as they don’t hinder the reader’s comprehension of the text.

And now a little word about the tail, the conclusion. Let it not be abrupt. Let it summarize and restate in brief the thrust of your argument and let it invite your readers to exercise their minds on the ideas presented.

So next time when you pick up the pen to write an English essay or a blog, thou shall not find yourself in a soup as to what, how, where to write. In other words you will be in a better position to write better English. Always remember that an easy reading has a hard writing effort behind it. Maximize your efforts while you write in order to minimize the reader’s effort to comprehend what you have penned down. Put the weight of your thoughts, your imagination well behind your write-up

Speak English Fluently and Clearly

2009-10-05T00:29:00.000-07:00

We all want to speak English fluently and clearly, and for most learners, this is the toughest skill to develop. TCYonlin.com helps you to improve your English speaking ability through clear explanations, repetitions, and activities. You can also learn correct body language and how to use it in the right way.

It is a well accepted fact communication skills play a vital role in today’s world where geographical boundaries are gradually vanishing. To interact you have to read, write and speak effectively. It is a fact that a person with poor or ineffective communication skills often gets ignored. Equally important is one’s ability to understand what others speak and write. If you make grammatical errors in your communication, others will not be able to understand you and on certain occasions others may even misunderstand you. In the same way if you get a write-up full of grammatical errors, you won’t be able to understand it. Both these situations can occur when things are not made clear by using correct Grammar.