The selection process to the IITs, NITs and IIITs have three important levels of filtering — the Board, the JEE-Main and JEE-Advanced exams. Ajay Antony enlightens you on ways to prepare for the new entrance exam format.

Finally, our new HRD Minister has given the go ahead for the new format set for admission to IITs and other centrally-funded institutes. In this article we will look at how to prepare for the new pattern of the entrance examinations of JEE Mains and Advanced.

The selection process to the prestigious National Engineering Colleges like IITs, NITs and IIITs have three important levels of filtering — the Board, JEE-Main and JEE-Advanced exam. While the Board score and performance in JEE Mains are crucial for the selection of all students, the JEE Advanced score is taken into account for students aspiring to join the IITs.

The JEE-Main will be conducted on April 7, 2013 (off-line) and April 8 to April 30, 2013 (online).  This test will have a single paper with questions in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry having equal weightage.

The multiple choice questions will have a single correct answer. +4 marks will be awarded for a correct answer and -1 mark will be deducted for a wrong answer. The level of difficulty may be on par with the previous AIEEE papers. The syllabus will be the same as that for CBSE XI and XII.

JEE-Advanced will be conducted for the top 1.5 lakh (inclusive of all categories) students from JEE-main exam on June 2, 2013. This test will have two papers on the same day (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry having equal weightage, and may have different types of objective questions.

NITs and CFTI selection: Ranking will be given based on a score of 60 per cent for JEE-Main and 40 per cent normalisation score of the Board exams.

Selection for IITs: Ranking will be based on JEE-Advanced score but the selected student has to be in the top 20 percentile of students of the concerned XII Board.
Thus it is very apparent that all the three filters as mentioned above are crucial for entry into the IITs, whereas the first two are crucial for entry into the NITs.

While preparing for these exams one needs to concentrate on the following:
nWith about four months left for JEE Mains, one needs to assess one’s performance in the pre-board exams, as by this time most schools would have completed the syllabus. Utilise the pre-Board exam for self-assessment of your Board score and the target should be around 90 to 93 per cent plus. Once the syllabus is over, one should prepare for both the Board and JEE-Main simultaneously since the syllabi for both the Board and JEE-Main are almost similar.

nFortunately, we have around 50 days’ gap between JEE-Main and JEE-Advanced Exam. So it will be better to concentrate more on the Board exams and JEE-Main.
Moving forward, the students will need to concentrate on the following to do well in the selection process. 

nPrepare well for the Boards: If a student has studied properly for the Boards, then he / she is more or less prepared for the JEE Main exam. Proper revision with the help of Board prescribed books such as NCERT will help a student to strengthen his basic fundamentals, which will be useful for scoring good marks in the Boards as well as in JEE-Main.

*Focus more on conceptual topics: It is very vital to have the ability to solve many analytical and application based questions so that the concepts are clear. The new format is all about understanding concepts.

*Mock exams/practice papers: Once the revision is over, students should take up model examinations which will help not only in strengthening application of concepts, but also in improving speed, another prerequisite needed for clearing the examinations successfully.

*Review the model examinations to clearly understand the areas in which your are making mistakes. These need to be checked with the best possible solutions available for these papers.

*The errors can be categorised as conceptual errors and calculation errors. In order to tackle conceptual errors, students need to get back to the basics of the relevant subjects. For other types of errors, students will need to understand the more appropriate / more applicable method of solving the problem.

nA systematic and focused preparation, constant revision and writing model examinations in all seriousness will see a student through in achieving his/her goal.

(The writer is course director, JEE Training Programme, T.I.M.E.)