The admission test of IBA at The University of Dhaka, being an aptitude test, features some of the most unique content seen in undergraduate admission tests in Bangladesh. The same applies for the IBA MBA admission test as well. With the mounting pressure of academics, it gets tough to start preparing for it parallelly. Hence, a majority of the students get only the 3-4 months of the admission season to have a holistic preparation, in which they cannot afford the frustration of a trial and error process of figuring things out or give in to the anxiety of missing out on unknown variables. Here are a few strategies that can make your preparation journey a bit more bearable:
The irksome process of memorising long lists of vocabulary overwhelms aspirants to the point of burning them out mid-season. One way to prevent this is through etymological analysis of the words. The more you observe the world around you – the media, the billboards, the jargon – the more you will find recurring patterns in words, all involving common root words or suffix prefixes. For instance: the word misogyny specifically refers to dislike for women. Another word – gynaecologist – has the same root word ‘gyn’. So, you can guess that ‘gyn’ would mean ‘of woman’ or ‘related to woman’. Now if you were to mention an antonym for misogyny, and you don’t know the male counterpart of a gynaecologist, you can look into other words. Gynoecium, the female reproductive part of a flower has a counterpart – Androecium. So, the opposite of misogyny would be misandry. This also leads to the realisation that sexism is not necessarily misogyny. Connecting the dots this way can help cluster a bunch of words for easy memorising.
Don’t be obsessed with numbers
The go-to source of vocabulary is Wordsmart 1. This book contains a list of around 850 words. Candidates often find themselves focusing too much on how many words they learnt rather than if they can convert them into deliverable output. Such gamification and healthy competition among peers can be a good motivator to keep on pushing, but it comes at the cost of efficiency. Vocabulary comes mostly in the form of fill-in-the-blanks. Hence, just memorising the meaning does not give appropriate context to the usage of a word in a sentence. Important nuances are lost in the process. For instance, both ‘anomalous’ and ‘eccentric’ are synonymous with ‘irregular’. But you would not use ‘anomalous’ to describe Elon Musk’s whims. Anomalous is for describing situations or weather events just as eccentric is for describing behaviour or personality. Therefore, learning 75% of the words with 100% of the nuances provides a better output.
When coming across a new word in a movie, song or article, our general tendency is to assume a meaning based on the rest of the sentence or the context of the paragraph. Hence, we often learn words with wrong non-general meanings because the word would not fit in any other context. A quick Google search can bring clarity as well as help retain the word better without the added effort of memorisation.
Be it sentence correction or error detection, the long sentences often make the question incomprehensible and keep the focus off the error. Reducing a sentence to its bare minimum can impact comprehension enormously. This includes leaving out adjectives and phrases and replacing clauses with their respective parts of speech. A sentence: “Recently, hopes that the European Central Bank will reach a deal to help Spain and Italy borrow at cheaper rates has nudged financial markets higher” can be read as “Hopes that something will happen has nudged markets higher.” This reduces all the noise and lets the reader see that if there is a subject-verb agreement error.