Jiyuan Cao, enrolled in 2014, Class 1 of Mechanical Engineering and Its Automation from JCI, successfully cross-examined a graduate student majoring in computer technology at Tianjin University.

Take a look at his postgraduate entrance examination strategy.

Hello, everyone. I’m Jiyuan Cao, enrolled in 2014, Class 1 of Mechanical Engineering from JCI. This year, I was admitted to Tianjin University as a graduate student in computer technology and I am a typical three-span student (spanning region, school and major). Now I will write some tips about the postgraduate entrance examination, hoping to be helpful to the younger students who want to take part in the postgraduate entrance examination.

In fact, there are already a lot of experience tips about the postgraduate entrance examination on the Internet, and my experience is just for reference. Frankly speaking, I think that preparing the postgraduate entrance examination is very difficult. I have seen a lot of people who give up halfway, also have seen many people who fail it. Because the number of postgraduate entrance examination is increasing year by year, the postgraduate entrance examination will become more and more difficult. Hence, think about these questions before deciding to prepare the examination:

1. Are you really ready? What is the purpose of it?

Think about these questions firstly, because this is your motivation for the postgraduate entrance examination. This is actually very important, as having goals sometimes determines your attitude towards doing things. For me, my motivation for the examination is very simple: ①change major; ②do something that I am interested in. I was a junior when I came into contact with embedded programming, which opened a new world to me. After I made a car that can run and be remotely controllable, I suddenly felt that programming is very cool. In my opinion, this is actually a process of concretization of thinking. The ideas in your mind can be realized quickly through computers, and then you will get a great sense of satisfaction. You can do everything with a computer. Is it cool? As a result, I, a perfunctory student, had the desire to continue learning programming. Then, as you can see, I chose to take the postgraduate entrance examination to continue my studies to become a programmer and work for my interests. In fact, my motivation was so strong that I never thought about giving up preparing the examination, and I even didn’t think it a very hard thing. I just regarded it as a way to improve my self-learning ability and professional level. Hence, I felt the learning process was naturally fun. That is to say, if you decide to take the postgraduate entrance examination, you may know your motivation for it.

Then, let’s talk about school selection and how to obtain the examination information.

If you read a lot of postgraduate entrance examination experience tips on the Internet, there is one message that may impress you: for the postgraduate entrance examination, choice and effort are equally important. This sentence is not an exaggeration, because the postgraduate entrance examination is different from the national college entrance examination. The latter one is to choose the school after the examination, and the postgraduate entrance examination is to decide the school before the examination, which determines that you must carefully collect information from a mass of sources, evaluates your abilities and then makes your choice. Therefore, it is very important to obtain first-hand real and effective information. When I was choosing a school, I looked for computer science postgraduate entrance examinations’ information about more than 30 Project 985 universities, and learned about their admission scores, ratio of enrollment and admission, the difficult degree of professional examination subjects as well as the difficult degree of the postgraduate entrance examination in the past three years. And then I primarily elected three universities: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology and Tianjin University. When I finally signed up, I decided on Tianjin University, because I thought I could pass the examination of it, and the facts proved that my choice was correct. So if you want to choose goal schools, I suggest you take the time to find as much as the information I collected. As for how to find information, you can search the WeChat official account about your application major and add some relative QQ groups that will be special information. What’s more, you can also go directly to the postgraduate official website of each goal school (such as Chongqing University Mechanical Engineering College graduate official website), go directly to download the enrollment catalog of previous years to learn about enrollment information. After doing these, you actually have had a rough idea of which university you want to apply.

Next, let’s talk about review suggestions.

For the postgraduate entrance examination, the general score is 500, politics and English is 100 points respectively, and mathematics and professional courses examination are 150 points respectively. I get a total score of 370 this year, 68 for politics, 72 for English, 99 for mathematics and 131 for professional courses. Luckily, the minimum passing score of computer science major of Tianjin University is 318 this year. The individual minimum passing score subjects of politics and English need to reach 50 respectively, and the mathematics score need to reach 85. Hence, it is not any problem for me to enter the reexamination and if I can perform normally during the reexamination, I am very hopeful to be admitted by Tianjin University. In a word, the initial examination is very important and you should firstly consider it as the key point. Think other things such as the reexamination after the initial examination.

Politics and English cannot be gapped away from competitors, and generally 60 is a very stable score. The mathematics and professional courses scores can really make you stand out from the crowds. Most of the professional courses examinations are self-propositioned by the colleges and universities (usually the Project 985 universities), so the degree of difficulty is variable. The most troublesome thing is mathematics. Those who get a high mark of mathematics can be successful in the examination, and mathematics is also the easiest to widen the gap. It is recommended that you focus on mathematics in the early stage (May to September) to thoroughly solidify the foundation. If you plan to change your major during your postgraduate, prepare for professional courses early. You can usually start preparing them during summer vacation (July to September).

In the early stage of preparing English (May to September), recite all the vocabulary for the postgraduate entrance examination (about 3000 words), and then do the previous questions over the years. After doing these, I suggest reading these passages intensively to understand each passage, paragraph, sentence, and word, especially long and difficult sentences. It takes about three months to thoroughly understand the previous reading exercises. Then recite model compositions in the last month and do other types of exercises if you have time. It is not a big problem to get over 60 in this way.

I prepared politics in the last three months (September to December 22). In the early stage, I watched the video and answered the multiple-choice questions. In the last 20 days, I went back to recite the main points of the analysis questions.

If the professional courses examinations are self-propositioned, the preparing materials are very important. You can search on Taobao, or you can add some online groups to find the previous exam papers of your target universities to do where some senior classmates collect the materials and sell them.

Regarding the recommendation of postgraduate entrance examination books, there are a lot of online experience tips. I bought them based on these suggestions. In fact, don’t worry about this, because most of the common required courses’ tutorial books you need to buy are the same. Here is a list of books for reference:

Mathematics: Zhang Yu 18 Sections on Advanced Mathematics, Li Yongle’s Linear Algebra, Tang Jiafeng’s Review of Postgraduate Entrance Examination on Mathematics

English: Love to Practice with Words, Zhang Jian's Yellow-Covered Book

Politics: Xiao Xiurong’s Review of Postgraduate Entrance Examination on Politics

Professional courses: the previous exam papers of your target universities, professional tutorial books (if any)

Because the reexamination is different for each university, I omit it here. It is recommended to prepare as soon as possible after the initial examination. Usually, more than one month is enough. If you need to take a written examination for a cross-professional reexamination, 2 months for preparation will be better.

In fact, I’m almost finished. The last thing I want to say is that preparation of the postgraduate entrance examination is actually a protracted battle. The ones who are finally successful are those who can persist and carefully complete the learning plan. This principle is actually applicable to any successful case. People with patience, persistence, and enough effort will not fail easily. Come on! Take efforts to do things right now, and let the rest go its own way.