By Aditya Singhal, New Delhi: Joint Entrance Examination or JEE is one of the biggest and the most reputed entrance examinations for engineering aspirants, in the country. Most of the aspirants seek focused IIT JEE Coaching to prepare for these exams. Taking in support from experts and ex-IITians is what makes them prepare for the exam in a focused manner. And, learn new tricks to crack the same. While, JEE Mains give the students a choice to appear either in an offline/online mode, JEE Advanced can only be attempted in an offline (pen and paper) manner.
Statistics put the figure to around a whopping 12 lacs, for the students who applied for JEE Mains in 2017. While close to 2 lacs made it through to JEE Advanced. This is evident of the level of competition that can be expected at JEE Advanced 2018.
The Approach to JEE Advanced 2018
If you find a place for yourself in the lucky ones, start preparing for the JEE Advanced, well in time. This will help you to not get overtly burdened when you study for the board examinations along with the JEE preparations.
Use your time wisely to make time to schedule in your IIT JEE preparation along with your regular schooling.
There are mainly three subjects that will be tested – Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. In the first stage of the exam, JEE Mains, there is usually a merit cut off, in which the total score will be counted, but in the Advanced JEE, there is a cut off for each subject to be able to clear the exam. This is in addition to the aggregate cut off. It is important to acquire the sectional cut off of the subjects to actually pass the exam.
So, give all three subjects sufficient importance to get a good base of knowledge before trying to gain expertise in your favoured subject to increase the effectiveness of your JEE preparation. When you can get at least about 50% in a sample paper for all the subjects, you can move onto concentrating onto the subject you favour.
When you have enough time for IIT JEE Preparation, plan out to study the topics by keeping the time you have in mind. If there are 4 weeks till the JEE Advanced, you get 1 week of time per subject, and another one for cyclic revision.
Assign times for each of the subjects so that the learning progress is equal for all three subjects. While, if the time is short, the best way to prepare for JEE will be to revise the topics you have already learned instead of learning new topics.
Subject Wise Approach
For Physics:
The subject of Physics is pretty interesting and speaks about the concepts of matter, motion and light. It essentially is a Science that portrays itself as a distant cousin of Mathematics, and the theories are all explained by way of using different formulas and derivations.
Statistics say that a majority of IIT JEE participants across the years and the lucky ones who got through the same, consider this to be the most interesting subject amongst the three.
Formulas, derivations, and their results are very important. It is important to write down and practice the key important formulas and results of derivations.
Recommended reference books for the subject are Resnick Halliday and H. C Varma
Students should note that over the past few years, the questions of Electricity, Mechanics, and Magnetism have covered approx. 70% of the Physics Question Paper.
For Chemistry:
The subject comprises of elements pertaining the composition, structure, properties and change of matter. It describes and defines how elements with different chemical compositions interact and react through intermolecular forces.
Students are at an advantage with Chemistry, because most of the subjects are pretty direct. So, if one is able to understand and memorize the elements and their properties it gets pretty easy to answer the questions.
The subject requires memorization of chemical formulae and reactions. Knowledge of the Periodic table is important in helping score more marks.
Students need to be attentive towards their approach of answering the paper: they must begin by answering what they already know, then move on to resolving numerical on topics like chemical thermodynamics, solid state, mole concept etc
Organic Chemistry comes across to be a little time consuming and complex, so students must attempt the questions under this domain, towards the end
Recommended reference books for the subject are Morrison & Boyd and O.P. Tandon
For Mathematics:
Life is incomplete without Maths, and so is IIT JEE. And, this be the reason for the subject to be a deciding factor, when two or more students acquire the same scores on an aggregate.
This is a subject that requires a deeper understanding of the principles and a lot of practice Aspects of Algebra, Coordinate Geometry, Trigonometry, Differential Calculus and Integral Calculus make up for the IIT JEE Maths syllabus.
Wherein, Calculus seems to be the examiner’s favourite choice and comprise of major part of the Modern Maths\
Maths is a subject of immense practice, there is no way around that. Hence, students need to revise through self-practice. They can even join coaching classes to get a grasp on specific tricks to solve the questions
Recommended reference books for the subject are R.D. Sharma, S.L. Looney, Hall Knight & Arihant.
General advices to be followed while studying the subjects are given below:
Practice as many questions and question papers as possible as there is a higher chance that questions that have been previously used will repeat in the coming exam. This is one of the best practices that helps to score higher marks.
Avoid answering lengthy questions, at the start if you have limited time at hand
Always focus on your stronger subjects or topics and finish those first before moving onto others.
Try to understand the concept that forms the base the topics and the subject. This will help you remember the answers better and sometimes if needed help you arrive at the answer even if you don’t know it.
Practice all the subjects as much as possible, write down basic formulas, important concepts, shortcuts to find or verify answers etc. to help memorize the topics for a better result.
Most important point to note is that the more time and sincerity that is dedicated to studying these subjects, higher the chance in cracking these competitive exams. Aspirants can also join IIT JEE coaching classes to learn all the tricks. All the best!
About the Author: Aditya Singhal is the co-founder of www.askiitians.com, an online coaching platform for IIT JEE, Medical and School Entrance exams. It is his passion and vision to help the engineering and medical aspirants that he along with his co-founder started with this venture. He had worked with Kurt Salmon Associates, a reputed American Management Consultancy.
