A defense aspirant should focus on his/her overall effectiveness in routine life. The adequacy in personal effectiveness will determine the result at SSB.

The major problem with practically all the coaching academies is that the persons running the coaching academies try to teach the aspirants, what they (assessors) were taught at Defense Insititute of Psychological Research (DIPR) and then during their practical training at one of the SSBs.

The aim of the training received by the trainee assessors is to develop the ability to assess the aspirants appropriately.

The aim of the coaching academies should be to guide the aspirants gain overall personal effectiveness to get selected and not become an assessor. The aims of teachings at DIPR for trainee assessors are absolutely different from the aims of the coaching academies. Since the guys running most of the SSB coaching academies lack clarity about the aims of the coaching academies, they have created a lot of confusion in the minds of the defense aspirants.

‘Actions justifying your thoughts and words’ is a vital idea utilized by the assessors to establish congruence or consistency to judge the performance of an aspirant. This idea is of little relevance for an aspirant. An aspirant concerned about this, will only get confused by trying to establish congruence/consistency and would only be getting concerned as to ‘what the assessor will think’ of his ‘thoughts’ expressed in the Psychology Tests, ‘words’ spoken to the Interviewing Officer and ‘actions’ displayed in front of the GTO.

An aspirant should focus on doing the task assigned to the best of his/her abilities without getting concerned about the assessment.

All SSB aspirants should note that the chances of getting selected by the SSB would be higher for a competent young aspirant vis-a-vis the Director of the DIPR. Thus, trying to learn the functioning of the selection system is of hardly any use to an aspirant.