How to Crack Aptitude – General Aptitude + Techical Aptitude | My Personal Experience

Hey  What’s up guys, Tanmay Sakpal here and today I’m going to talk about Campus Placements! Especially the part of Aptitude exams(General + Technical Aptitude) like how do we have to tackle it.

Now before I even start here’s a quick disclaimer –

“Everything I did to tackle campus placements are my personal methodologies and might not be suitable to you. Having said that, it surely will shed some light on things to do and more importantly things NOT to do”

Well the disclaimer is for the purpose that every individual is different and different methodologies of tackling placements might work for you. Self-Awareness is the KEY.

Anyway, here’s a little sneak peek of my college experience. I completed my Masters in I got placed in Asian Paints via our Campus Placements. And if you might want to know more about me, hit me up via email – [email protected]

So let’s start off. Okay so you might be in your Final year or about to graduate into TY and you must’ve already started off with placement lectures (extra lectures by third party institute). So how do you go about placements? Well, you may think it’s easy to pass a campus placement interview but its not like that. It never worked like that as Campus placements is NOT our regular college exam where we simply mug up some theoretical answers and we are done. No! That’s not how it works and it never will!

Well here’s what I feel about a typical Campus Recruitment interview Process (I’m taking my own experience as reference) There are 3 parts –

1. Aptitude Test (General Aptitude + Tech Aptitude )
2. Technical Interview
3. HR round

A Group discussion round might come along after Aptitude test, however I find it rare these days. I’m going to tell you what I did and will suggest few things you can add on to improve these 3 domains.

General Aptitude –

img src = giphyStarting off with our main focus Aptitude test (both general aptitude and technical aptitude) –

Well here’s what you must’ve been told about Aptitude test – “It’s a filtration process to select only a few since we’ve got too much population in India you know 😛 ”

As much as this is true, I do feel it is a great way to select people who have a logical edge over the rest. Aptitude tests are not your regular college exams and they do test your logical thinking and analytical skills. So yes this is the first step.

What did I do for this? Well in our college, we have aptitude lectures specially conducted by third party institutes.

As I said I’m going to be honest about what I did, so during my time, these Aptitude lectures were setup on weekends and in the vacations after sem-5. Well, I only attended a few initial lectures (5-6honestly which would be about 10% of total lectures. So basically I missed a lot 😛 ) as I was involved in other work i.e. freelancing. But that didn’t mean I ignored this Aptitude part. The reason I was a little easy on this domain is because I had this thing kind of figured out according to me. I studied all the aptitude problems from www.indiabix.com Trust me they’re pretty decent for basic to intermediate level. Now you must be wondering how much time did I invest in all this, But to be honest I started studying for my aptitude a month before placements(this is definitely not the ideal way as I said initially 😛 ). It took maximum 40 days (2-3hrs daily practice) to have a decent hold on General Aptitude (quants majorly)

Well that’s me, that how I did my General Aptitude.

Now for what you should ideally do and not do again according to me –

• First of all rate yourself on how good are you in Aptitude (overall all sub-topics)
• Create a schedule you are comfortable (I could never cope up with campus credentials lecture speed and that is totally because I was involved in other work) So its okay if you find yourself being bad. What’s important is you set your own schedule and work on it.
• Put in  the  work.  There’s  no  running  away  from  aptitude.  You  have  to  solve  it  yourself. Reading the solved examples will never You got to write them yourself while practicing.
• Never wait for someone to explain you. GOOGLE IT! Or you can just go to YouTube and search it.
• Lastly, set milestones and daily check them to see whether you are progressing or not

Now this was just for the General Aptitude. So what about the technical Aptitude? Yes that’s a whole new game!

Technical Aptitude –

img src = giphyFor that you need to start off from the basics. Here’s what I feel is expected in tech aptitude.

• Core concepts  (of  all  IT  subjects  not  just  programming  e.g.  –  Boolean  algebra,  digital electronics, OS, DBMS, programming, Networking etc. )
• In Programming domain – At least one Language needs to be strong (I suggest you select between C++ or Core Java) I studied Core java right from the basics (refer com). I have these 2 programming languages covered on my youtube channel -& also on  www.youtube.com/simplesnippets my website – www.simplesnippets.tech
• For Databases – SQL queries needs to be good especially the sub queries and joins Also Normalization is important to know.
• Solving programming questions from big website like codechef, hackerrank is ideally great but I hardly solved any questions from those websites. Frankly speaking they are too complicated.

That’s all guys; this was my experiences and my overview about the Aptitude Exams in the entire campus recruitment process. One small suggestion – Live your life and chill out a bit. Interviews are really not that difficult as they sound. You just need to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses. All the best!

Peace! 

Tanmay Sakpal