Monday, June 29, 2009

Pre-preparation for the GATE preparation

In this post I will try to answer some of the important questions that usually arise in the mind of a GATE aspirant.


PHASE 1: To become familiar with GATE exam.


I think I should start with the very basic question, “What is GATE all about?


You can get the answer of this question by simply visiting the website of any IIT or IISc. For your reference I am providing one link below. One can go through that.

http://www.gate.iitb.ac.in/gate2k9/index.htm


Please note that this information is about GATE09 only. It may be subjected to change for GATE10. The websites will be updated as form for GATE10 will be available. Generally form is available in the month of October or September end.


PHASE 2: Preparation.


For a GATE aspirant after getting answer of first question the chunk of questions will arise regarding preparation. Now I am trying to answer all those questions one by one.


1. What is the correct time to start preparation for GATE?


Ideally one should study all the courses thoroughly at the college level. It means that the preparation for GATE starts as soon as one takes admission in the engineering college. But I know this is the ideal thing and only few can do this.


As in beginning no one can decide whether he want to do M.tech or not. This maturity comes in the 2nd or 3rd year only, as now one can decide whether he is interested in the technical stuffs or not.


As far as my personal opinion is concerned one should start preparation during the 3rd year. And one should appear for GATE in the 3rd year to have a feel about exam, but if one have not prepared well this will be of no worth. So try to complete as many subjects as possible (perfectly) before you appear for the GATE during the 3rd year. This will help you a lot to find out where you are lacking in preparation, how to manage the paper in 3 hours, what is the effect of negative marking and all such important issues.


2. What is the authentic material for the preparation?


There are many different opinions for the answer of this particular question.

As far as I am concerned I had took lot of pain in the selection of authentic material for preparation. As this is the most important aspect of the preparation.


There are so many misconceptions that the book from GK publication is enough for the preparation or say various materials available from different coaching institutes do the work. Frankly speaking all these materials available in the market are supplements only. They are not at all enough for the perfect preparation for GATE.

The most important material is authentic books for a particular subject. Always prepare any subject from authentic books only.


I had approached to IITs’ professors for this and I had come to know about the various authentic books which probably I had not used during my college. And I had experienced the difference too between books used at our colleges and these books. Some of the books were same too.


I am going to produce a list of books to be used for different subjects of mechanical engineering.


1. Advanced Engineering mathematics by


a. Erwin kreyszig (John wiley & sons publication) (strongly recommended)

b. Dr.B.S.Garewal (Khanna publications) (strongly recommended)


2. Engineering mechanic (statics and dynamics) by


a. Beer and Johnston (the Tata McGraw Hill publications)


b. Prof. P.J.shah
(few but various enough examples - good book)

3. Strength of material by


a. G.H.Ryder (English Language Book society)


4. Theory of machines by


a. Amitabh Ghosh and Ashok kumar mallik ( Affiliated East –West press private Limited)

b. S.S. Rattan ( The Tata McGraw Hill publications)


Both the books are necessary for the preparation.


5. Machine design by


a. R.S.Khurami ( S.Chand & sons publication)


Though this is not the authentic book but for subject it is more than enough for GATE)


6. Vibrations by


a. V.P.singh


7. Fundamentals of thermodynamics by


a. P.K.Nag (The Tata McGraw Hill publications)

b. Van Whylen (John wiley & sons publication)


Both books are strongly recommended and necessary for total preparation.


8. Refrigeration and Air conditioning by


a. R.K.Rajput (thermal science and engineering) (Laxmi publications)

b. http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/


This is the website developed by the IITs. Here you can get web courses for almost all courses. But the psychometric processes described here are too good. Please go through that.


9. Applied thermodynamics


a. R.K.Rajput (thermal science and engineering) (Laxmi publications)


10. Heat and Mass transfer by


a. Yunus A.cengel (The McGraw-Hill companies)


To understand the fundamentals properly I strongly recommend this book


11. Fluid mechanics and machines


a. Dr.R.K.Bansal (Laxmi publications) (strongly recommended)

b. Yunus A.cengel (The McGraw-Hill companies)


To understand the fundamentals properly I strongly recommend this book


12. Manufacturing science by


a. P.N.Rao (volume 2 and 3) (The Tata McGraw Hill publications)

b. Amitabh Ghosh and Ashok kumar mallik ( Affiliated East –West press Private limited)

c. P.C.Sharma

d. S.Kalpakjian (Pearson Education) (very nice book) (fundamentally strong)


All these books are necessary for the complete understanding of the subject manufacturing science.


13. Management science and Operations management


a. Hamdy A.Taha (operations research)( prentice hall of India privet limited)

b. William J. Stevenson ( introduction to management science)(IRWIN pub)

c. B.Mahadevan (Operations management) (Dorling Kindersley (India)Privet limited)

d. J.K.sharma (operations research)


Note. The topic named “Probabilistic Inventory system” is nicely given in the Brilliant tutorials.

To understand the fundamentals properly I strongly recommend this book


Besides this previous 10 to 12 years solved GATE papers are needed.


Another questions regarding PREPARATION such as How to prepare? etc will be discussed in the next post.

11 comments:

  1. Great Again. I want to know wats your opinion for going for various correspondence courses. Like gate forum, brilliant? do they really cover the basics at least. I know that we need std books, but at least will these material serve some use. Is it worth spending 5k for it ?

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  2. Well, I would say, coaching is not necessary, I did not go for any coaching classes, but appearing in exams regularly is a must. You must enroll to one or the other coaching class for examination. I was attending GATE Forum's fortnightly exams. Use the materials provided by them as a means of MCQ practice only and don't read anything from them, it may not be authentic, and mostly it is never authentic. Use standard books for reference and use the materials strictly for practising MCQs only.

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  3. See what i have experienced is that there are following problems with these materials available.

    1.They provide the MCQs which are either harder or easier than the actual questions asked in GATE.

    2. The answers provided by them are not authentic often. There are lots of mistakes in such materials especially in GK publication's book.

    3.The course in not defined in such materials. SO sometimes we prepare something which is not in a course also.

    4.They provide lots of questions that is not needed actually.

    In my opinion one must collect previous years question papers before preparing a subject. so that one can know up to what level one has to prepare. I will discuss this issue in more depth in my next post.

    And after that one must enroll for the GATEFORUM or any other authentic test series. this helps a lot. They also provide section test series where subject wise small papers are given but it almost cover all kind of questions which can be asked from that particular subject. Thus it provides an authentic enough questions.

    And if one wants more authentic questions to solve he can solve the illustrations and exercise questions from the authentic books listed in this post, for example, do solve all solved and unsolved examples from P.K.NAG. It is more than enough.

    Personally speaking all these are the only authentic questions which are comparable to GATE paper's questions. So no need to waste money on such materials This is my personal view.

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  4. Thanks for this informative blog. To Free Download more GATE Papers Just go through ShareTermPapers

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  5. Hi sir,
    First of all i will like to congratulate you on creating such an excellent and informative blog { probably the only one.} on providing guidelines for preparation of gate exam.

    I have a small query too,
    What's your view on the schaum's outline series books .
    I have given a cursory look to the books of fluid, som , thermal , design in the series .
    The topics are not covered very exhaustively but seems that useful enough coverage is given.

    What's your opinion on these books wrt to using as source material for preparing for gate.
    Kindly do reply .

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  6. @chandrakant,

    Sorry dear i don't have any idea about those books. But after reading your post i have tried to search about it. I found that they are just the suppliments but sometimes too cool that they are used as a textbook. So i can't comment on that. The basic logic is to understand the fundamentals thoroughly so if u are able to do that with the help of these books then surly go for it. The books i have mentioned is good and easy for understanding and GATE questions are being asked directly from them sometimes. Best of luck

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  7. I'm solving p.k.nag's numerical(both solved n unsolved)for thermodynamics but m finding difficulties in to some extent in unsolved sums, so if u have solution manual(i tried on net but in vain) of d same it will b very helpful to me, so if u r having it pls send it at gauravchotalia@gmail.com...
    waiting for ur response.

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  8. @gaurav, sorry dear we don't have the solution. But you can do one thing, you can send me or anyone of the authors the question numbers from P.K.Nag. we will mail you the answer. I can't think of any other way to deal with this.

    And sorry for the late reply. Any one can send his/her querries to my email address

    parth_585@yahoo.co.in

    Thanks.

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  9. Dear Sir,

    Thank you very much for being the guiding light for us. Your suggestions are helpful for all engineering students beyond departmental silos.
    On the ending note, I would like to request you to publish a set of authentic study materials for CS/IT students as well. Wish you illuminate the whole world one day. Thanking you.

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  10. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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