Dear Dr K,
Do you have any tips or strategies for how to tackle the board exams? If I do not score centum in all the papers my mother has said she will feed me to the crows. I am kind of desperate here. - Kaakai Saapad
Dear Kaakai,
The tried and tested method of cracking the board exams is to study extremely hard. However, I have never studied a day in my life and yet I did tremendously well on my boards, and have grown up to be an acclaimed non-expert on many subjects, including how to write exams. Here are a couple of unconventional strategies of mine that you can use:
1. Correct your paper yourself: The easiest way to get a 100 per cent on your board exams is to be the one who corrects your own paper. How do you do this? One option is to finish writing your paper, then take out a red pen and put tick marks over your entire answer sheet, and write 100/100 for yourself. When your paper reaches the examiner, he or she will possibly be very impressed by your initiative and will thank you for having saved them the trouble of correcting your paper, and will likely agree with your marking of your own paper. This method, however, is not foolproof. An alternate method of doing the same thing would involve growing up and becoming a teacher and then correcting your own paper from some 20 years ago using some kind of reality-altering device which will help you time travel.
2. Upgrade your brain . If you’re old enough to be writing board exams, there’s a chance you’re old enough to remember floppy drives. Do you remember those things? They had a storage capacity of 1.44 megabytes, and those were in their near-final avatar. Today we have flash drives that are less than half the size of a floppy with up to 1 terabyte of memory. That’s an increase of 10,00,00,000 per cent over roughly 20 years (tell me if my maths is wrong, I never was a very good maths student). Chances are, however, that you are still using the same brain technology you were born with, which is anywhere between 14-16 years old. Imagine using a computer or a data storage device that old. It would not be good for anything except perhaps playing Dangerous Dave or SkiFree, and there are much better games available now. My point is basically this — go get your brain upgraded, or better yet, replaced with a newer model that is faster and has a higher memory capacity. You know as well as anyone that how well you do on the board exams is directly related to how closely you can remember what was in your textbook, word for word. Contact your neurosurgeon and ask him what new brain models are available in the market.
Yours questionably,
Dr K