It was perhaps in my 10th standard, the first major exam of my life, that I was introduced to the concept of previous years question papers.
Imagine the excitement of seeing the same questions you read in the papers a few hours now sitting right in front of your eyes. It felt like a cheat-code!
I used to be a student who read chapters that the teachers labeled not needed for the exam. Some of them were so interesting I wondered why anybody would want to skip them.
This continued well into college. Everytime I could get my hands on such older question papers, the advantage was huge.
To be honest, I felt conflicted back then too. As if I was cheating but at that time I couldn’t tell why I felt so.
Only much later did I get the answer to this.
Standardized tests don’t measure learning. They measure test-taking skills.
You can theoretically top your class without learning anything! So what’s the problem you ask.
That the cheat-code only works for standardized tests. And most things in life are simply not that. Careers and interviews are not. Dating and love are not. Businesses are not. Including the quintessential question of how to live a life?.
So anybody who still thinks in terms of How did X do this in the past? or What’s the formula for Y? is likely to struggle. That’s why most advice on topics like love, success, career, happiness, marriage never really works.
Everybody’s question paper is different. Life isn’t a standardized test.