One often thinks how much attempt will be good enough to get me a good rank. The answer can be found by doing a small analysis.
You need to give around $15$ STANDARD mock test, nothing can be better than previous years to know the answer and it needs to done before the END OF DECEMBER. 
Extract data from it.
Here’s how

Make an excel sheet similar to this .
You will get all the previous year mocks from  here

The following can be extracted from the excel.

  • Your average number of attempts.
  • How much you are scoring in 2 marks(35 questions)
  • How much marks you lost in negative.
  • What is your accuracy.

Add more columns if you need, delete few columns if you think are redundant. This gives you the answer of how much is enough. Now ask yourself

  • Are you satisfied with the marks you got ?
  • Is our accuracy bad?
  • Do you need to increase your attempt ?
  • Do you need to strengthen your concepts?
  • Are you facing difficulty in context switching (CN question followed by TOC followed by Engg Maths) ? 
  • Are you doing lot of silly mistake ? ( https://gateoverflow.in/blog/7349/how-to-minimize-silly-mistake)
  • Is there a problem with your attempt strategy ?

Now once you have understood the problem find the solution at then end you will have the answer to the question 

What is sufficient number of attempts ?

I will show my excel and how I decided what is good number of attempts for me

 

Let’s do a small comparisons between average of mocks and Gate 2019

  Average Gate $2019$
Result $75$ $71.67$
Out of 70 $52$ $48.67$
Out of 30 $22$ $23$
Attempt $54$ $56$
Correct $49$ $48$
Negative $1.64$ $1.33$


Giving GOOD mock is necessary, and there can be nothing better than previous year.
I won’t recommend you to take any test series (https://gateoverflow.in/blog/7305/test-series-recommended) but I know you will so my only piece of advice will be finish previous year mocks first and then switch to any thing else.
PS: A small advantage is their in solving previous year mocks is that you have solved many questions so you might get 5% more than what you can expect in actual gate examination, if you have not memorized all the answers of previous years.

posted in Preparation Experience Feb 23, 2019 edited Mar 11, 2019 by
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3 Comments

3 Comments

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But @abhishek shaw

If we will use previous year as test series then how (or from where) we will practice the questions after reading theory..? Pl guide
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So your doubt is basically that
You have already solved those questions once after reading theory while solving previous year, so you have already seen all of them before.
But there are more than 3k problems in GO book, so you might remember 10-20% of them but definitely not all and
moreover in GATE we all know questions are NOT REPEATED but CONCEPTS are.
80% of GATE questions are asked on concepts that has been already asked in previous years.
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Thanks for the blog, loved it. can you please provide your excel sheet copy, if possible ?