DSSSB Pharmacist common mistakes
DSSSB Pharmacist · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Spending the first minute or two on a single General Awareness question about a scheme, award, or appointment, then rushing the remaining questions in that section.
General Awareness is the most fact-recall-heavy section, so candidates feel they should know every item. When one fact is missing, they freeze and try to reconstruct it from fragments instead of moving on. The section is usually short on time relative to the number of items.
What to do instead
Adopt a strict 20-second rule for General Awareness: if the answer is not recalled immediately, mark it, pick the most plausible option, and return only if time remains. Before the exam, build one-page revision sheets of current affairs from the last 8-10 months and static facts (polity articles, national parks, classical dances, books and authors) so recall is faster than reasoning.
Treating General Awareness as pure current affairs and ignoring static topics such as constitutional articles, scientific units, or Indian geography, then guessing on those items.
Coaching material and social media push current affairs heavily, so candidates over-invest there. Static questions appear predictable but are actually scattered, and candidates assume they will not be asked.
What to do instead
Split revision time roughly 60:40 between current affairs and static GK, and cover static GK by category rather than randomly: polity (articles, schedules, amendments), geography (rivers, passes, crops), science (units, diseases, vitamins), and art and culture. Use short self-quizzes per category so gaps are visible.
Attempting every reasoning question in strict serial order, so a long seating-arrangement or puzzle set eats 8-10 minutes and the easy series and analogy questions at the end are never seen.
Reasoning sections are deliberately ordered with heavy puzzle sets early. Candidates fear leaving blanks and keep restarting the same puzzle, which feels productive but yields nothing.
What to do instead
Do two passes. In pass one, answer all one-line items (analogies, odd-one-out, number and letter series, coding-decoding, direction sense) and skip any multi-condition puzzle. In pass two, return to puzzles with a hard 4-minute cap each. Before the exam, practise 15 one-line items in 10 minutes to build the habit of fast scoring.
Solving seating arrangement and blood relation puzzles by drawing a fresh diagram for each condition instead of committing one layout and testing each clue against it.
Under time pressure, candidates read a clue, draw, erase, and redraw, losing track of which clues were already applied. This produces contradictions that are blamed on the question rather than the method.
What to do instead
Use one fixed layout per puzzle: draw the row, circle, or family tree once, then tick off each clue as applied. For blood relations, use standard symbols (+ male, - female, = spouse, vertical line for parent-child) and always draw the tree rather than doing it mentally. Practise 10 puzzles with this notation until it is automatic.
Losing marks in Arithmetic on questions that look familiar by skipping the unit and ratio check, for example mixing metres and kilometres in a speed problem or treating a percentage increase as a percentage of the new value.
DSSSB arithmetic leans on standard topics (percentage, profit and loss, time and work, average, simple and compound interest) that candidates have seen many times. Recognition triggers a memorised formula, and the units or base value in the actual question are not read.
What to do instead
Before computing, write the given quantities with units and identify what is asked. Convert everything to one unit set first. For percentage problems, state the base explicitly ('increase on cost price, not selling price'). Keep a personal error log of every unit or base mistake and review it weekly.
Doing all arithmetic with full written calculation, long division and manual multiplication, so 25 questions take the whole allotted time and the last few are blind-guessed.
School habits carry over, and candidates distrust approximation. They also lack memorised tables, squares, and fraction-to-percentage conversions, so each step is slower than it needs to be.
What to do instead
Memorise squares to 30, cubes to 15, tables to 20, and common fraction-percentage pairs (1/8 = 12.5%, 1/6 = 16.67%). Use option-based solving: substitute answer choices, eliminate by last digit or rough magnitude, and estimate before computing exactly. Time yourself on 20 questions in 20 minutes to confirm the speed gain.
In Hindi Language and Comprehension, reading the passage once quickly and then answering grammar and vocabulary questions from general impression rather than locating the relevant line or applying the rule.
The passage feels easy because it is in the candidate's first language, so it is read casually. Grammar items such as sandhi, samas, and muhavare are then answered by ear, which fails on standardised wording.
What to do instead
Read the passage twice: once for gist, once with questions in hand, underlining the sentence each answer comes from. For grammar, revise the standard categories with examples: sandhi types, samas types, tatsam-tadbhav, paryayvachi and vilom lists, and muhavare with meanings. Practise 20 grammar items daily and record wrong ones by category.
Answering Hindi vyakaran questions on the basis of spoken usage, choosing the form that sounds natural in daily speech rather than the prescribed grammatical form.
Colloquial Hindi differs from the standard written forms tested, especially in spelling (shuddh-ashuddh), gender agreement, and compound word classification. Candidates trust fluency over rules.
What to do instead
Treat grammar as rule-based, not intuitive. Build a table of the specific tested topics (sandhi, samas, karak, vachya, kaal, shabd-ashuddhi) with one rule and two examples each, and revise only from that table. When two options sound acceptable, check the spelling and the grammatical category before choosing.
In English Language and Comprehension, choosing an option because it 'sounds right' in error-spotting, fill-in-the-blank, and synonym questions, without checking grammar rules or the exact word meaning.
Candidates rely on reading fluency built from everyday English rather than exam-standard usage. Idioms, prepositions, and near-synonyms are especially prone to this, and options are designed to sound plausible.
What to do instead
For error spotting, check a fixed list in order: subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, article, preposition, pronoun, and parallelism. For vocabulary, learn words in pairs with their exact synonym and antonym plus one sentence, and revise idioms with their meaning and a usage example. Practise 15 error-spotting sentences daily and write down the rule violated.
Leaving no time for review and filling OMR bubbles section by section while solving, so a changed answer is not reflected correctly and misaligned bubbling goes unnoticed until the end.
Candidates bubble as they go to save time, but a skipped question shifts every subsequent bubble by one. Without a review pass, neither the shift nor a misread option is caught.
What to do instead
Bubble in blocks of five to ten questions, checking the question number against the bubble number each time, and keep a 5-7 minute review window at the end. During review, verify that blank questions are marked in the booklet and that the bubbled option matches the intended one. In mock tests, practise the same bubbling pattern so it becomes routine.