 Preparing for the MA English entrance exam of B-H-U-D-U-E-F-L-U or J-N-U or are you planning to give C-U-C-E-T? Friends, if you're somebody who falls in this category where you're looking forward to join a prestigious institute in India to pursue your master's of art in English literature, then I'm here to give you a tie-to-arm hug because this is the video for you. Wow! In this video, I'm going to be talking about how you can prepare for the MA entrance English exam in a very easy way. I'm going to not just help you with the best books, but will also provide you with some free resources using which you can streamline your MA entrance preparations. Sounds exciting, right? I promise that I will make this even more exciting by answering all of your questions by the end of this video. Now guys, before we start this, the first thing that you should be aware of is that there are limited seats in all these universities. Friends, in this video, I'm going to be talking about the entrance exams of University of Hyderabad, D-U, B-H-U, J-N-U, C-U-C-E-T and the competition all these universities is very, very high. There are less than 40 seats in each of these universities for MA English course and that is the reason why the competition becomes so tough because the best brains in India are competing with you to get that particular seat. So in this video, I'm going to be talking about how to cover the vast syllabus with books to buy, how to prepare in a very simple way. Not just that, I shall also be telling you how to manage the huge syllabus along with your BA third year exams. So please watch this video till the end because it is very important that you know what to study and even more important to know what are the sources from where you should never study and that's going to be revealed at the end. Friends, let us start with the general aptitude paper. There are certain universities where questions related to general aptitude are asked. For example, questions related to logical reasoning, computer, mathematical reasoning, data interpretation. These are asked just to check your basic analytical skills. This is very similar to paper one in UGC net exam. In CUCET, 25 marks out of 100 are for general aptitude. However, friends, some universities don't ask questions related to general aptitude. So you have to see the syllabus of your university to check if general aptitude is the part of the MA entrance syllabi or not. And if it is a part of the syllabi, then here I am with two Ramban tips. Tip number one, you can pick any guidebook for general aptitude. There's no particular book that I will tell you to buy because all the guidebooks more or less cover all the topics and there's no special book where all the questions come. Your friends often say that buy that book and all the questions will come from there. So let me tell you, there is no such book. So pick up any guidebook and start preparing. Tip number two is to allocate minimum preparation time for general aptitude portion. You should only allocate 10 to 15% of your time in studying general aptitude. Rest of the time should be devoted to only English literature. Now, why am I giving you this tip? Because at a lot of places, you just need passing marks in general aptitude. The marks are not even counted in the final exam. Or even if it is counted, the weightage is pretty less. Plus it is super easy to crack it. This is something that you can prepare in last 10 to 15 days. So stop devoting a lot of time and energy in preparing for the general aptitude portion. Friends, now let's jump to the most important portion of the paper, which is the syllabus of English literature. Friends, first of all, get this to your head that you cannot take the syllabus of English literature lightly. A lot of students think that just because they were scoring good marks in their bachelor's, they will easily crack the master's entrance exam as well. That's not the case. And I have three reasons to substantiate my point. Firstly, what you need to remember is that bachelor's syllabus is very limited. But the syllabus of these entrance exams are extremely different and vast. For example, DU or JNU's exam are conducted by NTN. The same body that conducts UGC Net exam. That's why DU and JNU paper is very similar to the UGC Net paper. And that is the reason why it is very, very difficult to crack. Secondly, there is a lot and lot of competition. There are hardly 30-40 seats and more than 10,000 students are competing for these seats. And thirdly, another important point is that right before the entrance test, you have your third year exams. So a lot of students struggle to divide time between the two. So this makes it all the more challenging. That's why I always recommend that you start studying six months beforehand, six months prior to the MA entrance exam. So that even if you are devoting just 1-1.5 hours every day, you can easily ace the entrance exam and do your masters from a reputed university in India. Friends, a reputed university is very important for your resume. People are always going to judge you based on which university you did your masters from. Now that you know about the difficulty level of the paper, let's jump and talk about the syllabus of these entrance exams and how should you approach it. As soon as you decide to sit for entrance exam of any particular university, open the MA entrance syllabus and check what all topics you did not study in your bachelors. For example, if we talk about EFLU, their paper focuses on American literature, European literature, Australian literature and a lot of other literatures. Most of these writers are not taught in bachelors and private universities in India. Now if we talk about linguistics, BSU paper has questions from linguistics. However, linguistics is missing from syllabi of most colleges in their bachelors program. Another challenge is that most of these universities have not mentioned list of topics that can be asked in the exam in the syllabus. Instead, they just mention broad topics like history of English literature. Now history of English literature comprises of more than 4000 writers. How do we know which writers are important for MA entrance and which are not? So it is the student who has to create the actual syllabus. How do we do that? After going through the past year papers and jotting the topics from where the questions have been asked. Hence friends, only after analyzing the past papers, you will be able to understand the pattern of the paper and the actual syllabus. And for that, you need to have full knowledge of the syllabus. And the entire knowledge of the syllabus will only be with you once you have analyzed the past year papers and made a list of questions. Friends, when we look at the MCQs related to writers in past year papers, we think, oh, this is very easy. But my question is, itna easy hai to solve kar ke batao? And when you will do that, you will realize that 4 options itne similar hai that you end up getting confused. And this is the reason why solving the past year papers will give you the exact idea of your preparation level. If you are looking for past year papers of MA entrance exams of famous universities like JNU, DU, CUCT, then we invite you to visit our website right now. We have provided past 5 years MA entrance papers along with the answer keys free of cost on our website, arpathakarva.com. You can simply go download the paper and start your preparation right away. Now the question arises. Arpatha, we have created a list of writers from which the questions were asked in the past papers. But what are the topics that we should cover for each writer when you are preparing for MA entrance? Friends, you will find a lot of writers like Virginia Wolff, T.S. Eliot, and you will think that I can cover them from any guidebook. I can read about these writers from any particular book. However, that's a blunder which any student can make. You need to study in detail about all these writers. For each writer, you need to understand and make notes about the literary age to which the writer belongs, important historical facts related to the age, then comes the entire biography, which will include information related to their schooling, college, their literary journey. If they have worked with any important writer, then you need to study that as well. Additionally, you should know the summaries of all their major works. For example, if we talk about Virginia Wolff, you should know the summary of Mrs. Dalloway to the lighthouse. In fact, not just the summary, you should also know important characters, important quotations, intertextual references, themes, etc. In the market, you will find guidebooks, which will hardly have half a page of information on these writers. But just reading that half page won't do the job. You need to study the writer in depth to be able to crack the master's exam. Hence, I would never recommend you to study from a guidebook unless you cover all the other above mentioned topic from somewhere else. Friends, let's now go to the most important part of today's video, which is which are the free resources that we can use or which are the books that we should buy to prepare for MA entrance exam. Friends, even before knowing what to select, you need to know which books to reject. For example, TS Eliot has written so many poems out of which questions have only be asked from two or three of them. Once you analyze the questions in the past year papers from TS Eliot topic, you will know the works from which the questions have never been asked. You will outrightly reject such works and focus all your energy on poems from which questions are asked repeatedly. Students keep on studying stuff which is not even asked in the exams. This does not let them focus on topics which are repeatedly asked in exams. So please be aware of this mistake. Market is flooded with all kinds of books and study material and there is so much knowledge available online over the internet. Now the problem is if you purchase books from the market or take something from the internet, you have to put in a lot of efforts into making your own notes. We have simplified this with our online video course for MA English entrance exam. We are proud to announce that we are the only institute in India that teaches through animated video lectures. Our videos are designed using 3D graphics and animation which enhance the visual memory of the student so that they are able to retain the complicated summaries of novels, plays and poems easily and they can recall it effectively during the exam. In our online course, we provide you with topic-wise video lectures with rich animations covering all topics in a step-by-step manner which works even when you have done no previous preparation. We also provide you with high quality PDF and revision notes on our syllabus-wise topics comprehensively and ensure that you qualify your dream exam in just one attempt. Along with video lectures and PDF, we also offer test series that consist of more than 3,000 unit-wide questions that comes with detailed explanations plus after every test, you get a detailed performance report in your ranking in all India leaderboard which will help you spot your weak and strong areas. We cover all important topics, writers and works in our online course. The detailed list of all these writers that are covered in our online course is available free of cost on our website, arpithakarwa.com. You can even download this free list and start preparing for these exams by your own. The link of our website and all the courses that we offer are given in the description box below. You can check out the course details from our website and even watch a free demo lecture, attempt a free demo mock test before you decide to enroll in our course. For more information related to the courses we offer, feel free to shoot your queries on WhatsApp number displayed on your screen and me and my team will be more than happy to assist you. If you want to do self-reparation and not enroll in our online course, then here's a success strategy that I have to share with you. This strategy will help you waste the exam with sufficient input. Here's the booklist you can follow if you decide to prepare on your own for MA English entrance examination. Friends, in order to cover British history, you can either refer to Routeless History of English Literature or William J Long or Edward Elbert. So these are three books from which you can study British literature. Now the challenge is that you just don't have to study British literature. In MA entrance, a lot of questions are asked from American literature, European literature, post-colonial literature, Indian literature. So there's no particular book for these literature of different countries. Though there are some books available in the market for these topics, but the challenge is that either they are extremely detailed consisting of 300, 400 pages or they are very concise and they miss out on the important information. So for world literature, I would recommend you to instead go to internet sites like lit charts, grade saver, cliff notes, e-notes. Basically make a list of all the important writers of world literature from the past year papers and study their biography from Wikipedia. Then make a list of all their important works and study the works from internet from the sites that I just mentioned lit charts, grade saver, cliff notes. You can also check out the detailed list of all the important writers that you must cover for MA entrance which is available free of cost on our website www.arpathakarva.com Now friends, after completing the entire literature British, American, post-colonial, European, Indian let's talk about literary theory. For literary theory, there are two books. One is Peter Berry. Another one is Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory by Pramod Kenyar. Friends, these two books are very simple. However, if you did not study literary theory in your bachelors I don't think it is a good idea to directly jump to these books. In that case, you can check out the videos posted by me or other YouTubers on literary theory that will give you basic understanding of literary theory and then you can go ahead and study from those books. Now let's talk about literary criticism. There's a very good book called History of Literary Criticism by Ramavad Trivedi and Vikramaditya Rai. This book includes criticism by Aristotle, Plato, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, basically all the major literary critics. Again, if you haven't studied it in your bachelors please don't jump to these books. Rather, watch some YouTube videos which will give you basic understanding of what exactly literary criticism is and then go ahead. Another very important topic that you must cover for MA entrance is literary terms in devices for which you can refer to a glossary of literary terms by M. H. Abrams. This book will give you information about major literary terms like meter, toky, anapest, foot, zeugmas, pondi all these topics will be covered. Now, as promised, let's talk about which books you should not purchase. We should know what materials to reject so that we can put our efforts in the right direction. Friends, if you're buying a book for MA entrance and you are not able to understand its language you should not buy it. No matter if your friends are studying from it you should not buy it. One such example is History of English Literature by David Deches. It's a phenomenal book. But it is not at all beginner-friendly and the language is very complicated. So if you read a few pages from that book and you don't understand it, leave the book. Even if your friends are reading it another important book to avoid are the ones which are extremely lengthy and supplies lots and lots of irrelevant information. For example, a History of American Literature by Richard Gray is one such book. It's a very lengthy book containing 952 pages. There's no need to read so much about American literature when just four or five questions are asked from it. You will definitely be wasting your time reading such books rather than purchasing it. Make a list of American writers and study them from Wikipedia's, park notes, lit charts, great savers. So many online resources are available. Friends, another kind of book that you should avoid completely are the guidebooks which are very concise. Now these books may be good but they often don't cover important details. Relevant details from point of view of entrance exams. For example, in such books you will usually find half a page written on writers like Charles Lam. Hardly any guidebook talks about the most important essay written by Charles Lam that is Dream Children. Another example, there's a poem by John Dunn called Validiction Forbidden Morning from which a lot of questions come every time an entrance exam. However, no guidebook talks about this poem in detail. They'll just give the title of the poem. They'll not give the summary of the poem. They'll not give the important quotations of the poem. Friends, if you did not study this poem in your bachelor's it would be very difficult for you to answer this kind of questions by just reading that guidebook. Hence, my recommendation will be to study the past year papers to see what questions are asked and accordingly study those topics from internet or from any particular teacher. Another important tip is that don't refer to two books for the same topic. You will be making double effort and will end up getting confused because you have time crunch and you won't be able to complete the syllabus in time if you're referring to two, three books for each topic. Hence, to sum up, you need to take care of four things before buying a book. Number one, don't buy books which has difficult language. Don't buy books which are very exhaustive. Don't buy books which miss out on important details and don't refer to two books for the same topic. Now, friends, before finishing off the video I would like to give you two bonus tips. The first one is, please don't cram. By just cramming, you cannot ace any exam. You need to have an in-depth understanding because the questions are based on comprehension knowledge and ability. In fact, for most universities the objective of the test is to select those who demonstrate not just in-depth knowledge of literature and culture but literary sensibility in a capacity for original thinking. This is what they state in the MA entrance syllabus. Friends, the second bonus tip is please don't read without making notes. We often start reading a book like a novel and as soon as we put it aside we forget what exactly we have read. Francis Bacon said something very interesting on this. Reading makes a full man. Conference makes a ready man. And writing makes an exact man. It's a very famous quote by him. He basically means that when you write something you're able to understand the thing to its core. So when you're reading, either keep highlighting or keep making notes in your notebook. Writing gives you an immersive sensory experience and you will be able to retain whatever you have read. So that's it from my side. Keep preparing for your MA entrance exam. I wish you all the best for the upcoming MA entrance exam and I really, really hope that you get into the prestigious university you dream of. That's it from my side for this video lecture. I'll meet you very soon in the next video lecture. Till the time we meet next, happy learning, keep loving literature and stay tuned to arpitakarwa.com