A twoyear plan to prepare smoothly for entrance exams
PLANNING If you have just started preparing for the JEE or NEET exams, here is a two year plan to help you with the vast syllabus and questions.
Every year, lakhs of students appear for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to engineering colleges and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for admission to medical colleges. These exams are regarded as two of the most significant and competitive exams in India, since they open doors to premium institutes - the IITS and NITS, and well known government medical colleges. Some students start preparing for these exams from class eight itself, but most begin right after class X board exams, giving them enough time and a fair chance to score well. If you have just started preparing for either of these exams, the vast syllabus and complex questions can be daunting. To make things slightly easier, here is a two year plan to help you:
REMEMBER,
THIS EXAM WILL BE AN ONLINE EXAM, AND YOU CAN CHOOSE THE DATE YOURSELF.
syllabus. Ensure that you spend time revising old concepts, so that you don’t forget them while studying new ones. You should try to finish this in a year. Remember, you will also have to juggle between college (since what you are studying now is not what is happening in class) and college exams. To make things easier, you can take topic wise tests on your class 11 portion to see how much you have remembered. This is the home-run. Now you’re done studying the entire portion.
• The first three months, you should spend giving subject wise mock tests. Find out which areas are weak and revise those chapters. Practice tougher problems and learn how JEE and NEET questions can be twisted to trick you. Understand where can you save time and where should you spend that extra minute. If you’re confident, you can also attempt a few
mock tests!
• Remember, now JEE and NEET are conducted twice a year. If you wish, you can appear for the exams in January of February to gauge where you stand. Remember, this exam will be an online exam, and you can choose the date yourself. Also, only the best score (between the summer and winter exams) will be considered. Don’t hesitate from giving it a shot even if you aren’t fully prepared!
• In the next three to six months, you should attempt test series and solve previous years’ question papers. Ensure that you do this in as much of an exam-like setting as you can. Time yourself and find out which subject is the fastest, which subject do you score the most in. These exams go on for a long duration of time and you must train yourself to concentrate for this duration. However, don’t make the mistake of blindly solving question papers and expecting your score to increase. Go back to the solutions. Even if your answer was correct, did you use the fastest approach to solve it? For incorrect answers, find out if it was a silly error or a fault in your conceptual understanding. Remember, even repeated silly errors are not a good sign, especially since these exams have negative marking.
This is an overview of how you could break your syllabus down and make it a little more manageable. It is advisable to start preparing for these exams two years prior. If you have missed that bus, you can still follow this plan, but split it according to how much time you have left.