A quick disclaimer first: the Buet admission curriculum has changed quite a bit since my batch sat for it, so I can’t promise this maps perfectly onto the current format. What I can promise is honesty about the approach, the missteps, and the small tricks that quietly saved me more than once.

If there’s one question every Buet aspirant gets asked on repeat, almost like a rite of passage, it’s this: “koybar question bank complete korso?” It sounds almost comical in isolation, but it carries real weight, because repetition in this exam isn’t about memorising answers, it’s about building the kind of muscle memory that lets your hand start solving a problem before your brain has even finished reading it.

The foundation of everything, though, was far less glamorous than question banks. It was simply doing well in the daily exams. Studying the day’s material on the day it was taught, without letting it pile up into an avalanche waiting to bury you later. There’s a reason athletes talk about “showing up on the boring days”, the ones with no big competition, no crowd, just quiet, unglamorous repetition. Admission prep runs on the exact same fuel. You cannot sprint through months of backlog the week before an exam and expect your body or brain to cooperate.

I also kept separate notebooks for class notes and maintained a simple weekly log: what syllabus I’d covered, how much I’d revised, how many practice sheets I’d actually finished versus just downloaded and left to gather digital dust. At the end of each week came the weekly exams, and I treated them seriously, not as a formality but as a mirror. You can drown yourself in every imported problem book that peer pressure convinces you is essential, but there’s an old proverb that fits perfectly here: you can’t chew more than you can swallow. Finish what’s already on your plate before reaching for someone else’s.

As the pressure mounted, and it always does, music and the Pomodoro technique became my two steadiest companions. If you haven’t come across it, the Pomodoro method is essentially timeboxing your focus into short, intense sprints followed by brief breaks, originally built around 25-minute work blocks. I adapted mine loosely: roughly four minutes per question, aiming to clear about six questions within twenty-five minutes. For physics specifically, I trained myself to write comprehensible answers rather than exhaustively detailed ones, since Buet rewards clarity and speed over essay-length explanations. That saved me precious minutes I could redirect towards actually thinking, rather than writing paragraphs no one asked for.

For maths, I wrote every step down in a separate copy just to maintain rhythm, and music, oddly enough, became something close to therapy. I still can’t fully explain how a few bars of a familiar song could pull my racing mind back into focus during a stressful exam, but it did, consistently. If music isn’t your thing, white noise works just as well for a lot of people, the auditory equivalent of a steady heartbeat keeping panic at bay.

Chemistry deserves its own confession. Organic chemistry, specifically, humbled me every single time I opened that chapter. I understood the logic of the reactions perfectly well, yet the exact equations would slip out of my memory like sand through fingers, and it made me feel, more than once, like the least capable person in the room. So I built small handwritten notes I carried everywhere, tucked into my bag like a lucky charm, and reviewed them in stolen five-minute pockets of time, on rickshaws, between classes, wherever I could. It wasn’t glamorous. It worked anyway.

Then came the paper-based model tests, and I’ll be honest, they broke me for a while. My response to that heartbreak was, in hindsight, a little unhinged: I started re-solving every single weekly question and every model test paper again, right after results came out, layering fresh practice on top of ongoing revision instead of choosing one over the other. It was exhausting, but it worked, mostly because failure, when you actually sit with it instead of running from it, tends to show you exactly where the cracks are.

I also did some genuinely unhealthy things during this stretch, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Late-night YouTube doomscrolling, entire series binged at odd hours, running on three and a half to four hours of sleep some nights. It eventually caught up with me, scattering my focus and leaving me perpetually drowsy. Once I noticed the damage, I pulled back, though I still don’t regret carving out that small pocket of recreation entirely. As the old adage goes, all work and no play doesn’t just make you dull, it makes you brittle, and brittle things break under pressure exactly when you need them not to.

When my model test scores stayed stubbornly low, I reached out to a teacher for guidance. He asked me to send daily updates of my marks so he could pinpoint the weak spots. Here’s the twist, though: it wasn’t really his analysis that cracked the case, it was the simple act of tracking my own numbers closely that revealed the truth. My errors weren’t conceptual at all. They were mechanical, small slips while copying digits from the question paper into my calculator or onto my answer sheet, the kind of mistake that has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with rushing.

So I adjusted the one variable I could actually control: calculator speed. I trained myself to input numbers faster and more precisely, cutting down the transcription errors that had quietly been sabotaging me all along. Sometimes the fix isn’t a deeper conceptual fix at all, it’s just slowing down at exactly the one small hinge point where things kept breaking.

For the actual exam hall strategy, I relied on what I’d call the “read twice, decide once” technique. The moment I received the written paper, I scanned the first two questions of each section and asked myself a simple question: could I gain speed by starting here? I chose to begin with chemistry. For every question, I read it twice, and if I felt confident enough to answer immediately, I wrote without hesitation. If not, I moved on without a shred of guilt, because guilt costs time you don’t have to spare.

I followed that same rhythm through physics, then finished with maths. Out of forty questions, I answered thirty-two, confident in thirty of them and shakier on the remaining two. With time still on the clock, I followed one more rule: never leave a question blank if you have even a minute left. I filled in four more partially, and time ran out just as I started a fifth.

And here’s the last, maybe most important habit of all: I never matched answers with anyone after submitting the script. What’s done is done, and there is genuinely nothing to be gained from replaying decisions you can no longer change. As the saying goes, don’t cry over spilt milk, especially when the milk in question is an exam you’ve already handed in.

So that’s the full picture from my end, mistakes, small victories, and all. If there’s one thing I hope you take from this particular chapter, it’s that discipline doesn’t have to mean punishing yourself into the ground. It can look like a notebook, a bit of music, an honest look at your own mistakes, and the humility to fix the small, boring things instead of chasing something more dramatic. Whatever exam you’re walking into, I hope you walk in steady, and I hope you come out the other side without losing yourself anywhere along the way.

Read part 4: https://tbsgraduates.net/campus/diaries-of-an-admission-season/overcoming-dhaka-universitys-a-unit/

Read part 3: https://tbsgraduates.net/campus/diaries-of-an-admission-season/the-mist-dilemma-and-the-du-b-unit-gamble-part-iii/

Read part 2: https://tbsgraduates.net/campus/diaries-of-an-admission-season/the-medical-heartbreak-and-the-mist-comeback-part-ii/

Read part 1: https://tbsgraduates.net/campus/diaries-of-an-admission-season/choosing-the-battlefield-part-i/