Thoughts on how to prepare for engineering competitive exams in India
Watching Kota Factory Season 1 on YouTube reminded me of my experience preparing for AIEEE 2009. Ten years have passed since I took that exam. Notably, (a) this exam is now known as JEE Main and (b) over the years, I have thought over things I could have done differently. Given that context, this post is about sharing those thoughts because they might be potentially be useful for current aspirants.
Without further ado, here are things which can potentially improve an aspirant’s performance:
Meditate daily to gain focus
First some background:
Unlike the board exams, the competitive exams have a different format. Specifically, the competitive exams have objective questions instead of subjective questions, and the result is based on rankings (AIR 1000)instead of absolute score(95%).
Consequently, these exams require that you have a balanced mind during preparation as well as during exam. Therefore, doing yoga, especially pranayam for fifteen minutes can be a good idea.
“Success is not final and failure is not fatal “
This quote from Winston Churchill is relevant. Doing poorly on one exam does not mean you are going to get the same score on the actual exam. In fact, you can learn from your mistakes and do better in the next exam. For example, even if you are at the bottom half of your class in terms of rankings, you can do better in the next exam. Additionally, the popularity of the faculty or the number of the batch you are in also do not gaurantee you a seat in IIT or another engineering college.
Learn at your own pace
This point is similar to the previous one. Specifically, comparing your performance with other students is not always healthy. For example, for me, I wanted to finish up all the problems before due date and before other students. This was basically due to FOMO. This resulted in me looking up solutions which did not help in learning.
Calibrate your goals regularly
Usually students have two years to prepare for JEE Advanced(used to be called IIT-JEE in my time). But at the same time, BIT-SAT and other exams are also held at around the same time period after Standard XII board exams.
It is true that preparing for JEE Advanced, which is the toughest, prepares you for the “easier” exams. This however only applies for the folks who ace JEE Advanced. For rest of the students, it is better to invest in preparing for other exams.
Specifically, by end of Standard XI you should know whether or not you stand a solid chance of cracking you key point is to pivot early e.g in Standard XI and focus on other exams so that you stand a better chance.
Importantly, not following the herd and instead focusing on what you can achieve can yield good result for you.
Overall, this post goes over things, which I think, can help improve an aspirant’s performance. Hopefully, this post proves to be useful to some of the folks who read this article. All the best to all the aspirants out there!
