Attempt & Analysis
Three sections that lock behind you. Four marks for right, one off for wrong. Treat it as three separate papers, give every question 45 seconds and 15, and carry nothing forward. Most people lose more marks to how they attempted than to what they did not know — and that part is fixable in a fortnight.
What's here
Before any strategy, the constraints. A Decathlon mock is built to mirror NEET SS, and these are the numbers it runs on:
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Questions | 150 |
| Time | 150 min |
| Sections | 3 × 50Q in 50 min |
| Correct answer | +4 |
| Wrong answer | −1 |
| Left blank | 0 |
| Maximum | 600 |
| Sources | Bailey & Love 28e · Sabiston 22e · Schwartz 11e |
One minute per question, on average, including reading a clinical vignette and an occasional image. That is not generous. It is also not tight, if you spend it unevenly on purpose.
The single most useful reframing: a Decathlon mock is not a 150-question paper with breaks. It is three 50-question papers that happen to run back to back. The section lock makes that literally true — when Section A closes it is marked and gone, as finished as a paper you handed in and walked away from.
Treat it that way and two things follow. Your pacing becomes simple arithmetic. And your Section B is no longer contaminated by Section A.
Fifty minutes for fifty questions is sixty seconds each. Split that sixty on purpose:
| Budget | Per question | Per section | What it buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| First touch | 45 s | 37 min 30 s | Read, decide, answer or flag |
| Revisit | 15 s | 12 min 30 s | The flagged ones, and only those |
| Total | 60 s | 50 min |
Both numbers are budgets, not stopwatches. Nobody times individual questions. What you do is check the clock at fixed waypoints:
| At minute | You should be at |
|---|---|
| 12 | Q 16 |
| 25 | Q 33 |
| 37 | Q 50 — first touch done |
| 37 → 50 | Flagged questions only |
Three glances at the clock per section. If you are at Q 24 when the clock says 25, you are nine behind and the fix is to flag faster — not to speed-read, which costs accuracy for almost no time.
Every question gets exactly one of three outcomes, and you choose within 45 seconds:
What you must not do is keep reasoning past 45 seconds. The second minute on a hard question is the least productive minute in the whole paper — and it is being paid for out of a question further down that you would have got in twenty seconds.
You arrive here around minute 37 with maybe 12 to 18 flags and 12 minutes. That is comfortably more than 15 seconds each, which is the point: the 15-second figure is the average you have earned, so a genuinely close one can take 45 and still fit.
On each flagged question, one question only: can I name the fact that decides this? If yes, answer accordingly. If no, keep whatever you already put down and move on. Do not re-read the stem for a third time hoping something surfaces.
This is the part that actually separates good attempts from good knowledge, and it costs twenty seconds.
Between sections, before you read a single new stem:
Write any Section A question that is nagging at you on your rough sheet — one word — and promise yourself it goes in the post-mock analysis. That is usually enough to let your head put it down, and it genuinely is the right place for it.
With +4 and −1, the break-even accuracy for a guess is 20%. Above that, answering beats leaving it blank. Here is every case:
| What you know | Chance | Average marks | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blind guess, 4 options | 25% | +0.25 | Answer it |
| Eliminated one option | 33% | +0.67 | Answer it |
| Down to two options | 50% | +1.50 | Answer it |
| Left blank | — | 0.00 | Worse than all of the above |
So on this marking scheme there is no question worth leaving blank. A blind guess on all 150 would average +37. That is arithmetic, not optimism: 25% × 4 − 75% × 1 = +0.25 per question.
The practical consequence: time is your scarce resource, not courage. Never spend 90 seconds deciding whether to risk a mark. Spend it eliminating one more option, then answer.
"I got 38 wrong" is not information. Six different things are hiding in that number, and they have nothing in common except the result. Separate them and most people find that only one or two categories actually dominate — which is the whole point, because then you know what to do next week.
Each one below has a signal — what in your attempt data gives it away.
You read the stem, nothing came back. No amount of exam technique fixes this one and no amount of worrying about it helps either. It is the honest, cheapest category.
Signal: you marked it as a guess, or rated your confidence low, and got it wrong. Fix: it goes into revision, not into a note you never reopen. Tag the topic and let spaced repetition bring it back.
The dangerous cousin of #1. You studied this in June, you would have got it in June, and it has decayed. It feels identical to "didn't know" in the moment, which is exactly why people keep re-reading new material instead of fixing it.
Signal: the topic's accuracy is falling across mocks, or the same question reappears in your error book. Fix: revision, not reading. If a topic scored well two mocks ago and badly now, the answer is never another textbook chapter.
You got it down to two and picked the wrong one. This is the most improvable category in the whole list, because you were one fact away — and that fact is usually a single discriminating feature, not a chapter.
Signal: marked for review, and your answer switched between two specific options. Fix: write the discriminator as one line — "X if the margin is involved, Y if it is not". One line per pair. These are the highest-yield notes you will make all season.
The most expensive mistake in mock exams and the most fixable. You had it right, you revisited it, you talked yourself out of it. Each instance is a 5-mark swing: +4 became −1.
Signal: your attempt records the option you had selected before the one you submitted. Fix: a rule, not willpower — only change an answer if you can name the specific fact that makes the new one right. "It feels wrong" is not a fact. Count these after every mock; the number drops fast once you are counting it.
You knew it and still got it wrong. Missed an "except", misread "most common" as "most serious", picked the right fact about the wrong structure. Characteristically: high confidence, fast, wrong.
Signal: you rated yourself confident, answered quickly, and were wrong. Fix: read the last line of the stem twice before looking at the options. Almost every one of these lives in the last line.
Not a knowledge problem at all. Section B overran, Section C got rushed, and the last fifteen questions were answered in four minutes. The marks lost here are often larger than any single topic gap.
Signal: time per question well below your own average on the ones you got wrong, clustered at the end of a section. Fix: the three-pass structure above exists for this. If Pass 1 is still running at minute 32, you are already behind — flag more aggressively.
Season V runs 10 May to 22 November 2026. As of today, 7 October, mocks 1 to 14 are done and the series is in its scheduled revision break. Six remain:
| Mock | Date | From today | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mock 15 | Sun 18 Oct 2026 | 11 days | Peak — weekly from here |
| Mock 16 | Sun 25 Oct 2026 | 18 days | Peak |
| Mock 17 | Sun 1 Nov 2026 | 25 days | Peak |
| Mock 18 | Sun 8 Nov 2026 | 32 days | Peak |
| Mock 19 | Sun 15 Nov 2026 | 39 days | Peak |
| Mock 20 | Sun 22 Nov 2026 | 46 days | Finale |
You also have mocks 1 to 14 sitting there, attemptable any time. The instinct is to "catch up" on all fourteen. Do not — you would be attempting four papers a week while also sitting the live one, and analysing none of them. The analysis is where the marks are.
Six weeks, one live mock each Sunday. The live mock is always the priority: it is ranked, it is against the cohort, and it is the closest thing to the real day.
That is 6 live + about 6 backlog = roughly 12 papers in 46 days, every one of them analysed. The remaining backlog mocks stay available afterwards as revision material — they do not expire.
After every mock you get a topic-level breakdown: where you are strong, where you are weak, and how your recent attempts are trending. Total score is the number everyone looks at and the least useful one — it moves for reasons you cannot act on.
Three numbers are worth tracking in a notebook, mock by mock:
Marks attempted versus marks earned. Score conflates how much you knew with how much you attempted; accuracy separates them. If accuracy is rising while score is flat, you are improving and attempting too little.
Of the answers you changed, how many went right-to-wrong versus wrong-to-right. This should be positive. If it is negative, mistake #4 is live and the fix costs you nothing but a rule.
How well you do on questions you were unsure about. This is the quality of your decision-making under uncertainty, and it is trainable — it is mostly elimination skill. It is also the number that moves most between mock 15 and mock 20.
A reasonable goal for the six remaining mocks is not a score. It is: cut technique-category losses (3, 4, 5, 6) in half by Mock 18, and hold your three strongest topics flat. Both are measurable after each paper, and both are achievable in six weeks in a way that "know more surgery" is not.
The Decathlon mocks are included at no extra cost with an active MCQ Elite or Prime 360 subscription, and the LMR Revision Booklet comes free with the series. Season V registration and the full schedule.
