Strategies to prepare for NEET

Being the key to a promising future, National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) is undoubtedly one of the most sought-after competitive examinations of the country. In fact, last year, over eight lakh students had applied for approximately 30,000 MBBS seats within the ambit of NEET.

With ample time still remaining, students, starting right from today, can lay the groundwork for a favourable outcome. One should start preparation well in advance with a highly goal-oriented strategy to crack NEET. You can exercise the following key points to successfully attempt NEET 2017.

Assess your preparation

Despite having a good preparation strategy, some students fail to perform as per their true potential in the final examination. The most critical thing to do during this moment is to carefully assess your preparation. Identify your strength and weaknesses in order to optimise your performance. This may include topic-wise preparation and your individual characteristics such as retention, speed, and conceptual understanding etc. Devise a comprehensive roadmap to eliminate your weaknesses and constantly polish your strengths. Also, take frequent mock tests as this will help you in identifying your shortcomings during the exam and enable you to work on them well in advance.

Further, it is also important to analyse the previous year’s question paper as well as the constantly recurring questions in different medical examinations. This will help in gaining a better understanding of the exam pattern and will help you in identifying the key areas that need improvement.

Work on your conceptual understanding as it will help you solve questions that appear in a twisted format. Analyse the problem-solving techniques and formulate a rough design to approach such questions. If there are various methods to approach the same problem, make sure you practise all of them.

Create a timeline

Allocate time to cover each and every topic individually to ensure that you complete your course on time. Also, do not clutter your desk with a long list of reference books. Focus primarily on NCERT, as 70-80% of the overall questions are either directly taken from NCERT textbooks, or are an advanced form of its learnings. Meanwhile, intensify your preparation and increase your daily study time. If you are facing difficulty in learning a specific topic, formula, diagram etc., create learning aids such as flashcards and fix them in front of your study table. Try to understand it through the learning aid whenever you take a short break. Also, do not forget to revise your covered portion during the course completion period.

Stick to your timetable

Create a timetable and strictly abide by it. While doing so, make sure that you spare adequate time for your hobbies and day-to-day tasks. As you advance, update your timetable as per the subject’s requirement. Also, allocate more time to difficult subjects. One must take breaks after a predefined interval of time to avoid fatigue and increase the retention. However, a study break should not become an excuse for procrastination.

Leave time for revision

Upon course completion, which should ideally happen one month before examination, give your undivided attention to drills and mock papers. While practising mock test papers, allocate equal time to each and every subject and, strictly obey it. While attempting question banks, practise at least 50 questions within 50 minutes. This will enable you to work under pressure. As soon as your entire course is covered, solve as much mock papers as possible. Your speed and accuracy will increase drastically as you amplify your practice.

It will also enable you to encounter your other shortcomings and will give you enough time to work on them. The aforementioned strategy will further help you establish a belief system, which is the most pivotal element during the examination. Do not try and learn new concepts or topics during the revision period; rather, emphasise more on strengthening the topics which you have already learned.  

NEET examination is quite similar to any game or sport. It can be easily said that good performance during a match is the most decisive element to win it. However, it is not possible to succeed without considerable hard work in the form of preparations. Keeping this in mind, aspirants must implement the above strategies prior to the examination to ensure success.

(The author is director, Aakash Educational Services)