Muhammad Hamza Waseem
“Entry tests.”
“Are you kidding me? Why do we have to take them when we have the laborious board exams!”
“Because the scripts of boards measure your cramming power and ‘e-tests’, your conceptual power…”
“Aren’t there any tests that can measure my procrastination power?”
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In an educational system flawed and failed not only with conventional methods of examination promoting a breed of ‘graduated clerks’ having eidetic memory, but also with the undue prestige given to the careers of medicine and engineering by the people, entrance tests become a dire need. These tests are supposed to fill in the gaps and loopholes and compensate for the flaws of the board exams. ECAT, which is abbreviation for Engineering Colleges Admission Test, is the acronym used for the combined entrance test for government sector engineering colleges of Punjab. It is conducted by UET Lahore. I have been asked to share my experience and advice regarding this test, which is as follows:
First of all, one must know the format of the test. 100 minutes for 100 multiple choice questions. Fair enough. You are to race against time. The better you run, the smoother you run, the less you fall, the better you perform. Natural sciences, namely physics and chemistry, and mathematics comprise 30 questions each. Plus, there is a section of English: a microcosm of 10 questions. Each question carries 4 marks, implying you are to fight for a score out of 400. A wrong question has a negative marking of 1.
The mathematics section of the test is usually thought to be the most difficult of all in the paper. It was not so in my case. Perhaps, I did not feel so because I have always been an adorer of mathematics. Most of the mathematics questions were based on general rather than specific topics taught in pre-engineering classes. Logarithms, quadratic equations, exponential equations, and probability were mainly focused by the exam master. There were no conics or trigonometry. Yet, my suggestion to the reader is to read the whole syllabus thoroughly for preparation.
The physics portion was perhaps the most time-consuming in the test. It majorly comprised numerical questions (not from F.Sc. books of course) on mechanics and electricity. Modern physics was nowhere to be seen. To make a long story short, this section only tested one’s calculation speed along with some concepts.
The English section was there just for the sake of its presence. It consisted of an article for “critical reading” (so easy that one could have left reading it and score a hundred percent in English) and 10 multiple questions based on the particle. To make a confident start, I suggest you attempt this section before any other section.
The chemistry section was sheer disappointment, to me at least. This section had left the boards behind in testing one’s memory and rote-learning ‘superpowers’. 30 MCQs were based on 30 “scientific” facts from those places of the book which are not usually the centre of one’s interest. As expected, most of the high-scorers of the boards performed well here.
To me, the test did not come up to what is generally expected of it: it did not test concepts much. For instance, those who are good at memorising dominated in chemistry here, just as they did in the boards. Yet, the test did a fairly good job in separating those who perform speedy calculation from the rest. In that sense, it achieved its purpose.
In a nutshell, time managed wisely, calculations performed quickly, and bookish facts remembered precisely are the trump cards you must possess to perform well in or ace the test.
The writer is a freshman in Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore.
