Transcript for:
Preparation Tips for Japanese Government or MEXT Scholarships Exam

please hit subscribe it is again exam time for the applicants of the japanese government or met scholarships and to help with the preparation and the actual exam i offer here some tips that could help you get through this very challenging process first off practice with the old exam papers this will help you develop confidence because you will have an idea of what will come out in the exam you will feel prepared and when you're confident and feeling prepared you're more likely to focus on the problems rather than on your anxiety about the exam so yes do all your best to practice with old exam papers number two on our list practice with the old papers again if you've done the papers once make sure you do it twice thrice four times as many times as you can because that is the only way that you get familiar with the kinds of question that's gonna be asked in the exams the next scholarship exams are quite challenging for many of us so reading through the solutions of a past exam paper just once or twice may not be enough to actually help you build that confidence you need to answer the actual exam so if you've practiced once practice twice practice as many times as you can and do it again and the third tip is to practice with old exam papers some more it cannot be emphasized enough that the most important thing you can do and the best thing that you can do to actually get good marks in the exam is to practice practice and practice with the old exam papers the exam is just four or five hours all in total but the preparation that should go into that into those last four or five hours should be hundreds tens or hundreds of hours and that means more than ninety percent of the time you spend for the exam actually happens before the exam itself so it only makes sense that 90 percent of the effort should be devoted on thinking about how to practice with the exam papers now the next few tips will not be about practicing again because hopefully by now you would have understood how crucial it is to practice with the old exam papers so let's go to the fourth one this is actually true with many of the exams that we do we do the easy ones first and skip the hard ones the reason for that is in the next exams most of the questions would have the same number of points and so if you do the easy ones first you are guaranteed those points more than you will be guaranteed if you do the hard ones first and if you are able to do all the easy ones then you can now go to do the hard ones but don't do it the other way around if you do the hard ones first you'll not have time to actually do the easy ones and so you lose all the points that you could have for the easy ones so do the easy ones first skip the hard ones to the last understand now solve later that's number five and what we mean by that is you have to have a good understanding of the problem what is it asking for what is it giving me before you actually start scribbling because it's a waste of time scribbling things if we don't actually understand the given and the problem itself so it's okay to start actually writing the given but to just write down a solution without understanding or with little understanding of what was given and what is being asked that's probably a waste of time here i have an example from the 2020 undergraduate physics exam so this is the second question of part one if you don't read the problem you might be intimidated by the diagram but actually when you understand the problem you will realize that the first part of this diagram is totally irrelevant to the solution the solution depends only on the last bit of the problem and so it's really important to understand the problem understand the given before starting to scribble down some solution tip six now you've answered the easy questions you're done with that you're left with hard questions now you read a question and you think you understand the question you understand the given and yet you still don't know how to start the solution you are on the first question of that section so what you're gonna do if you're stuck is actually write down the given and write some related ideas you will see how i do it in my videos here the first step i do is actually i try to explain the the given i i try to explain the key ideas that seem related to the problem and then i try to to explain the problem what is it looking for so if you try to do that with hard problems it might be easier to discover a solution for you so write down the given if you're stuck with the first question and write down some related ideas it might just open the doors for you now you're on a hard question and you've successfully answered the first question now you're stuck with the next question you don't give up it's a hard question but you've done the first question you don't give up on the next question what you can do is actually find clues in the previous question or questions that you've answered this is from the 2020 specialized training college math exam let's look at problem 2-5 it asks us for the ratio of areas of these triangles here and if you don't read the problem before it and the questions before it might be a little bit intimidating but when you actually answer the questions in the in the order they are given you will realize that question 4 for example gives a clue on how to answer question five and you can look at the solution in the link here but the idea is that the previous questions the answers to these previous questions would actually offer clues to seemingly difficult problems so if you're stuck with the questions in between make sure you try to review the answers of the previous questions next up work with consistent units especially in the chemistry and the physics exams the units will be given to you and luckily for us in many situations next is very nice to actually give us the units or the quantities in the units that make much sense so they do not ask us to convert units too often however it is also good practice to make sure that the units are right because that will give you a check of whether you're doing the proper manipulations or not here is a problem from the 2020 undergraduate chemistry paper that is the fourth problem of the fourth question and it asks us to calculate the equilibrium constant and this is tricky if you do not know the units because the equilibrium constant can have different units depending on the textbook you're using and so if you are going to be using the units given in the problem which is the best way to go if you are taking the next exam because max again gives you the quantities in the units that make most sense if you if you use these units make sure you use them in a computation because that will give you the proper units for the answer again in for example in this case if you're computing the equilibrium constant you can have different units depending on your reaction so you don't have a fixed unit like energy for example you're sure that it will be either kilojoules or joules or something like that but for equilibrium constants you're not assured that the unit is like this you can have mole mole to the negative three liters cubed or something else depending on the equation so the lesson make sure you check your units and make sure they're consistent math questions in next scholarship exams are often nice questions in the sense that their answers are often whole numbers or radicals or fractions and you don't have to do the tedious computation of decimals and all that kind of computations so it's not really much of a problem for the math exam however for the physics and the chemistry exam there are times when they actually ask you to give the answers to one significant figure two significant figures three significant figures and in those cases make sure to do the computation with the proper number of significant figures so you'll have to know the rules of significant figures however there are cases when they actually give choices if the choices are given you do not have to worry about significant figures because clearly it will be in the choices it will be different in the choices right the choices will normally have the same significant figures and just have to pick the one that is actually closest to the answer that you computed so if you're given choices don't worry too much about significant figures but if you have to answer with the number itself make sure you do right with the significant figures now if you don't have to worry about significant figures it's actually okay to use rounding and round the numbers up to or down to a number that makes the computation easier this is an example from the 2020 undergraduate physics exam this is problem four of four and here we are actually asked to substitute the values that they gave here into a formula and compute the value of t sub one however they also give us choices and you notice that all the choices are given in two significant figures that means we don't have to worry about significant figures in the solution of this problem and so what i did here for example is i did some rounding so for example when i got to this bit here instead of using 41.5 i decided to use 40 because 290 minus 40 is 250 so it's easier to manipulate and instead of actually computing this whole thing here 8.7 over 2.5 i decided to think about the the numbers that are that are easy to manipulate and still close to 8.7 so in this case i thought about 7.5 because 7.5 over 2.5 is actually 3 and 10 over 2.5 is actually 4. so instead of trying to compute this thing that looks a little bit well not so nice to me i i computed the thing that the things that are nice so i computed 300 and 400 and this 8.7 goes between 7.5 and 10 and therefore the t sub 1 also falls between 300 and 400 and the only answer given in the choices that actually satisfies this condition is letter d and so i answer letter d for this problem lastly focus focus focus resist the temptation to daydream i remember the time when i sat for the exams many years ago it was 8 a.m the first exam was mathematics it was only 60 minutes but i knew from the past papers that the exam could be challenging and so i was anxious i was nervous i was tensed and when i opened the papers started answering i realized that many of the first few questions were actually manageable and so my mind started to get excited and i started thinking about other things outside of the exam i started thinking about what if i actually get the scholarship what what kind of life would it be it would be nice and all that and the moment i started doing that i started to lose focus on the exam i started to not understanding the problems themselves that i had to to come down myself for me to be able to answer the rest of the questions because being very excited in the sense that i was it wasn't helpful it wouldn't help you with the exam and also you will start to panic when you realize that what am i doing i'm i'm just daydreaming so do not let yourself daydream the first moment that you see yourself starting to daydream force yourself to go back to the exam focus force yourself again to focus and just do it as many times as it takes just don't lose to daydreaming and those are my 10 tips for you for the upcoming japanese government or med scholarship exams i really hope that you do well on the exams i wish you luck i wish you all the best and if you do get the scholarship please don't forget me you can write down on the comments your experience and please let me know your wonderful wonderful experience as a mixed scholar soon so best of luck and go and study for your exams bye if you learned something new today please help my channel by clicking the subscribe button and the bell for the notifications see you [Music]