Issue 01 · 2026
The Karma Yogi Journal. Field notes for the long grind.
- Essays
- 90
- Exam tracks
- 5
- Topics
- 59
The Lead
The essay we keep coming back to.
The Archive
Everything else worth reading, ordered by date.
Page 4 / 9 · 89 entries
How to Build a Study Habit: 66 Days Is a Median, Not a Law
The "66 days to form a habit" number comes from 39 people drinking water and doing sit-ups, and the actual range was 18 to 254 days. Here is what that study really found, what it says about a study streak, and why the same paper is the best argument for not punishing a missed day.
Spaced Repetition for CAT Revision: What 317 Experiments Say
The meta-analysis behind spaced repetition covers 317 experiments and 14,811 people, and it says less about revising a CAT mock than every study-tips post assumes. Here is what it does say, what it does not, and the schedule I actually run.
Sleep Before Exam: The Night Before Barely Matters
MIT researchers put Fitbits on 88 students for a full semester. Sleep the night before a midterm predicted nothing. Sleep across the month the content was taught predicted grades. Here is what that changes about CAT prep, and what my own log cannot tell you.
Overconfidence in Exam Prep: The 14-Point Blind Spot
Across 310 students, the average first-exam prediction was 85% and the average actual score was 71%. The weakest quarter were out by 32 points. Here is why the gap exists, the one intervention that closed it, and the study that found overconfidence also helps.
Procrastination and Exam Prep: What 691 Correlations Show
Procrastination correlates with academic performance almost as strongly as conscientiousness does, and barely at all with intelligence. Piers Steel's 2007 meta-analysis pooled 216 studies and 691 correlations - here is what it actually found about why people delay, and what changes it, that has nothing to do with habit streaks.
Mock Percentile vs Actual CAT Percentile: My 18 Papers
A 54 and a 96 both returned the 90th percentile in my own mock log. Six pairs invert outright. Which is why "mocks inflate your percentile by 3-8 points" cannot be true in either direction - and what to track instead.
NEET Revision Schedule: What the Spacing Evidence Supports
Biology is 360 of NEET's 720 marks, and it is also the half of the paper the spaced-repetition literature actually studied. Here is what the evidence says about the gap between revision passes, where it locates an optimum, and the three places it stops being usable for a NEET aspirant.
How to Track Study Hours: A Method, and Its Real Limits
Log one row per session, at the moment it ends, with minutes that were measured rather than remembered. That much is worth doing. What tracking will not do is raise a score on its own - in my own log, elapsed prep time explains 14% of the variance in my mock results and my weakest section did not move at all.
Interleaving Quant Practice: 61% vs 38% in One RCT
A pre-registered randomised trial across 54 maths classes found mixed practice beat topic-wise practice 61% to 38% on a delayed test. My own log shows why that matters for CAT: the section I drilled topic-wise improved nine marks, and the section that needs selection improved two.
How Many CAT Mocks Should I Take? I Took 20 in 90 Days
The honest answer is 25 to 35 across a full cycle, and the count is the least important part of it. I took 20 in 90 days, seven of them within 48 hours of the previous one, and those seven taught me nothing at all.
Colophon
Written between mocks. Edited between sits.
Have an essay to contribute? Reach us at guruvellianish@gmail.com