Importance of old question papers

Cracking old question papers is a very good exercise and every student should do it regularly. It not only gives you an idea about the trends in the exams, it also gives you a lot of confidence.Solve the questions in the specified time only and try to score as much as possible. After doing the papers look for the common mistakes (I call it silly mistakes).Every student has a peculiar way of repeating these type of mistakes like not reading the whole question, confusion in questions having "all except", confusion in similar looking words etc.By good practice of solving papers again and again you can win over these silly mistakes and mind you by only minimizing these mistakes you can score a lot more in entrance tests, example- if you divide the types of questions in any entrance test like aipmt/aippg/iit-jee/aiims/afmc/aieee etc ,about 60 -70% questions are very easy questions and even an average student can crack them easily,nearly 20% are the tough ones which only some extra ordinary students can answer and rest 10 to 20 % questions are only for very brilliant or topper students but if we consider the cutoff merit or selection range of marks its always somewhere near 60-70% which means even if you are not a brilliant student or a topper you can crack the test with just minimizing your silly mistakes.