It is finally that time of the year when most of you are working on mock exams, and multiple revisions for the second cycle of the Combined Defence Services Examination. However, no matter how much effort you put in, you cannot clear the exam without a CDS exam strategy. Hence, to ease things for you a little, we bring you the sure shot tips that will help you crack the first step to becoming an officer in the Indian Armed Forces.
Need For CDS Exam Strategy
You might wonder why you need the CDS exam strategy in the first place. You are done with your syllabus, and are in the final stage of preparation, so what good can it do to you. Well, the answer is simple. You really need the CDS exam strategy for the following reasons:
- Understanding your weak and strong areas
- Maximizing revision of studied concepts
- Creating the exam-day mindset
- Building your own strategy for attempting the exam
Owing to these reasons, you can maximize your complete preparation using a foolproof strategy. Thereby, this blog.
CDS Exam Strategy
Now that we have an idea about the need for such planning, let us elaborate on the CDS exam strategy that you must implement to finalize whatever you have studied. So, let’s get started.
Attempt Full-Length Mock Exams
The first part of the CDS exam strategy is giving full-length mock examinations everyday. You can utilize a range of online sources for mock exams, which evaluate your performance immediately or refer to our exclusive books for this purpose:
- CDS OTA Countdown with OMR Sheets
- CDS Countdown with OMR Sheets
These will be effective during your preparation, as the CDS exam happens on OMR sheets, and you will grow more confident with each attempt. But do not just stop at attempting mocks; rather analyze your performance as well.
Learn your strengths and weaknesses, and if you feel that a particular concept was repeated across questions, take note of that as the likelihood of it appearing in the main exam is higher.
Study Essential Concepts
We feel that some questions are easily doable in CDS, provided that you have the knowledge of its basics. For example, let’s say you get a question about finding out the area of a rhombus, whose dimensions are given to you.
Now, this is a scoring question because you only have to put the values in the formula, but if you do not know the latter, you will be unable to solve it, right?
Hence, spend some time revising the essential concepts as part of the CDS exam strategy. By such concepts we are urging you to revise the following things necessarily, but you may add more:
- Mathematical formulae, especially regarding area and perimeter (2D and 3D shapes), statistics (mean, median, mode), and compound interest among others.
- Grammar rules like subject-verb agreement, punctuations, modals, et cetera.
- Basic facts such as types of soil/clouds and their features among others.
Revise the Examiner’s Favourite Topics
Each examination has a few favourite topics, which often have one or two questions from itself. You need to revise those in the last two weeks as well. Here is a consolidated example of the examiner’s favourite topics from Geography in CDS, starting from 2023 to 2025, which will help you to understand what we mean:
As you can see, the questions from Indian geography and world geography are repeated frequently, with special focus on river systems and mountain ranges, along with some other repeated questions. Hence, you should definitely focus on these topics.
Final Thoughts
Remember that the last 14 days are not for mugging up new concepts, or worrying about what would happen on exam day. These are the final few days for you to relax and revise what you already know. Please know that you have done enough, and now, you just need to be confident in yourself. Best of luck!
