If your preparation is good, use it to analyse the paper — find the questions you’ll definitely get, spot the ones to leave for last, plan your order.

If your preparation is not good, don’t analyse anything. Start solving the MCQs in your head immediately. You need marks on the board more than you need a plan.

In English and Hindi, do the unseen passage in reading time. It needs no preparation, it’s pure comprehension, and getting it done frees the whole first stretch of writing time.

Whatever order you use, decide it during practice papers and then follow it in the real exam. The point isn’t the order, it’s that you’ve already run it before.

Mine for Maths was 5-markers first, because they take the longest and at the end, under pressure, I simply couldn’t do them.

And then in the Class 12 finals I didn’t follow my own order, because I was confident in Maths. That’s exactly where it went wrong — 71 out of 80 in a subject I knew better than that.

If you realise mid-answer that you’ve gone wrong, don’t strike it out. Leave it, skip a page ahead, and start again there.

Only cut things right at the end if you’re out of time and it genuinely has to go.

Examiners award step marks. Half a correct method with a wrong final answer is worth real marks — but only if it’s still readable.

Go to the highest-return questions first — the ones worth most for the least writing.

On the rest, write the formula, write what’s given, and move on. That is the last resort and it does score.

Ideally you never reach this. Manage time so you finish early, not exactly on the bell.

Write "Given" properly with everything the question hands you.

Write whatever you know that’s related, even loosely. Waffle your way through it.

But cap the time — a couple of minutes, or leave it for the very end. Don’t let one question you can’t do eat the ones you can.

A ten-hour one-shot at 2x is the most comfortable way to spend a day and feel productive. You understand everything while it is on the screen, and then you sit down with a paper and cannot start. Understanding an explanation and being able to produce one are different skills, and only the second one is examined.

So watch the video if a chapter is genuinely new to you — that is what it is for. Then close it and solve. If you have a choice between the next video and twenty questions, it is the twenty questions, every time.

Here is the part nobody tells you, and it is the reason people give up on this. When you start solving, it feels like the teacher is doing the questions and you are getting nothing. You watch a solution, it makes sense, you meet the next question and you are blank again. That stage is horrible and completely normal, and most people quit inside it and go back to watching videos because watching feels better.

Push through it, because the thing you are actually building is not knowledge. It is pattern recognition. What feels like a hundred impossible questions is about ten approaches wearing different clothes. One day you read a question and realise it is the same shape as one you have already done, and after that it is not hard any more — it never was hard, you just did not know the approach. Once you know it you can take a thousand questions like it.

That is the whole game. Every question you solve is not one question. It is one more pattern you will recognise in the exam hall.

I did not study through the year. What I did do was lock in one or two days before every single school test, PT and preboard, and study properly in the gap days between preboard papers.

An all-nighter for me was about eight hours. Once per exam, seriously, for two years.

That residue is everything. When the finals come, you are not meeting the syllabus for the first time — you’ve already been through all of it once, under pressure, which is a completely different thing from having read it.

People say "no way you got that from just gap days". They’re right. It wasn’t gap days. It was one serious night before every school exam for two years, and then gap days on top.

Discuss it, argue about it, quiz each other. It keeps you at the desk far longer than willpower does.

Find the group that makes you study during exam periods rather than the one that makes you feel fine about not studying.

Study consistently all year. Genuinely best, and almost nobody does it.

Study only on gap days and in exam weeks. Workable, and it’s roughly what I did — but only because of the school-exam habit underneath it.

Study only before each school exam. The bare minimum that still works, and far better than nothing, because it forces you through the syllabus repeatedly.