Optimise your study plans for JEE Advanced

EXAM PREP

After the Board Exams for Class 12 in March, April and May are the months of entrance examinations. The most important one of them all would be the JEE entrance examination that many students aspiring to be an engineer take up. The good thing about the preparation for JEE is that it will help you with the preparations for several other engineering entrance exams also.

Your performance in the examination will as much depend on your strategy built on the strength of your fundamentals, your choice of questions and the time management in the examination hall. Let’s examine these elements in detail so that you can maximise your score in the exam.

Remember that these three are not exclusive and need to be applied in good measure together. Your objective is to maximise your score in the examination — not mastery of subjects — at this stage.

Strengthen your fundamentals
This element is almost done by now to the best of your abilities. The Board Examination would have given you plenty of opportunities to revise Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Specifically for the entrance examination, focus on the bullet points, formulae, multiple concept question varieties from the FEP (For Examination Purpose) revision. You should not be concerned about the steps or the derivations or too much of the ‘why’ at this last stage of preparation. If you find yourself asking too many ‘Why does this happen this way’ type of questions while doing a revision, that particular concept is probably not your strength and you should move on to the next topic.

Choice of questions
This looks like a simple statement, but given the complexity of the questions, your decision to ‘decide to attempt’ or ‘decide not to attempt’ in the initial round of scanning the question paper will either save your time or rob your time.
The idiom ‘Rob Peter to pay Paul’ is very relevant here. You have to decide not to give attention to certain types of questions that are either ‘genuinely difficult’ or are ‘deceptively lengthy or tricky’. The decision to make that judgement comes through doing various sample papers. 

Time management
Rather than starting off by solving the first question in the paper, do take about three minutes to scan the paper to decide the general difficulty level, mix of questions and your assessment of the gradation of difficulty of the three subjects. It’s always a good strategy to start answering the questions from your favourite subject.

At the end of the three-minute scanning, do commit to the strategy you have formed. Do not get distracted by anything else happening in the exam hall. The questions that you are deciding to leave for the second round of solving need to start getting your attention at least
40 minutes before the end of the testing period