The questions you could not answer are rarely where your marks went.
Look closely at any practice attempt and the losses divide into three groups: questions you genuinely did not know, questions you knew but got wrong, and questions you never reached. The first group is a knowledge problem. The other two are habits — and habits are faster to fix than syllabuses.
Mistakes in preparation
1. Reading instead of attempting.
The most common and most expensive. Reading produces recognition; the exam tests recall, which is harder and must be practised directly. If you have spent three evenings reading and none attempting, you do not yet know whether any of it took.
Attempt first, read second — in the gaps the attempt revealed.
2. Practising untimed.
Scoring well with no clock tells you about an exam you are not sitting. Add the timer from the first session, not once you feel ready.
3. Collecting material.
Four books, three PDF sets and a question bank is not preparation, it is procrastination with a productive feel. One source worked through completely beats four sampled.
4. Not keeping a wrong-answer list.
Without it, every practice session is a measurement and none of them is a plan. With it, your weakest four topics become obvious after a hundred questions.
5. Studying in order of comfort.
People study what they already like. Study instead in order of marks per hour: the subjects with finite syllabuses — Islamic Studies, Pakistan Studies, English grammar — before the unbounded ones.
6. Leaving the specialist paper until last.
If your post has subject-specific questions, that is where the field is thinnest and your advantage is largest. It should come first, not after a fourth pass through General Knowledge.
7. Starting current affairs too early.
It goes stale. Six to twelve months before the paper is the window; earlier material is General Knowledge and belongs in that subject's study time.
Mistakes in the exam hall
8. Spending too long on one question.
A mark is a mark. Three minutes on a hard question costs two easy ones. Set a limit of around twenty seconds on the first pass and respect it.
9. Attempting strictly in order.
This guarantees that if you run out of time, you lose the questions at the end — which are not the hardest, just the last. Use two passes: easy marks first, everything else second.
10. Answer sheet misalignment.
Where a separate bubble sheet is used, filling the wrong row and continuing invalidates everything after it. This is the single most destructive error available in an MCQ test, and it is entirely preventable. Check the question number against the row at every checkpoint.
11. Changing answers without a reason.
If you can say what changed — you misread the question, you now recall the fact — change it. If the only reason is that the other option now looks better, do not. Unjustified changes cost more marks than they gain.
12. Guessing without a rule.
Deciding question by question wastes time and produces inconsistent choices. Decide before the exam whether you guess, based on your test's marking scheme, and apply it mechanically.
13. Misreading the question.
Negatives especially — "which is not correct", "all of the following except". Examiners use these deliberately. A half-second check of what is actually being asked costs less than the mark does.
14. Not reading the instructions.
The number of questions, the time, the marking scheme, whether there is a choice of sections. Thirty seconds at the start.
The pattern underneath
Almost every item on this list comes from the same root: practising under conditions that do not match the exam.
Untimed practice, open-book reading, marking yourself generously, attempting in a comfortable order — each produces a feeling of readiness that the exam does not honour.
The correction is to make practice harder than the paper, not easier.
Practise under real conditions
Attempt questions on this site in quiz mode, which hides the answer until you commit — so you cannot mark yourself generously — with a timer, applying your guessing rule. Use learning mode for revision, where seeing the answer immediately is the point.
Start at the subject index or search for a topic.