Maintain speed and accuracy in JEE to score high in the exam

By Aman Goel

If your speed is high, you may make silly mistakes and therefore, you may lose out on your accuracy. If your speed is low, you simply might not be able to solve the paper completely, or even partially. As a result, students face a lot of challenges in figuring out the right balance between these parameters.

Highly competitive engineering entrance exams like JEE Main, JEE Advanced, BITSAT, etc require students to have great speed as well as a high hit-rate (accuracy). The question now is: How to achieve these seemingly opposite factors?

A typical JEE aspirant spends about two years in JEE preparation. Some spend 1 year, some spend 3 - 4 years (or even more). Point here to be noted is that the time that most people spend in JEE preparation is not in the order of weeks/months (like CAT), but rather years. As a result, a typical candidate has a lot of time to improve both speed as well as accuracy. It is just about right practice.

Now, rather than simply giving you the recipe to improve speed as well as accuracy, let us scientifically arrive at it. In order to improve speed as well as accuracy, a typical candidate can go by one of the 3 routes:

• Improving speed as well as accuracy simultaneously: During the initial phase of preparation, students don’t know much and so, the whole focus is rather on learning and acquiring knowledge. As a result, the concept of speed here doesn’t make sense at all. For instance, being able to solve 5 kinematics problems super-fast doesn’t make sense because the chapter in itself is quite simple and also, unless the chapter is coupled with a complex chapter like electrostatics, the vanilla kinematics problems are generally easy. As a result, trying to improve speed, or even measuring speed at such an early stage doesn’t make sense at all.

 

• Improving speed first and then accuracy: Going by the argument as mentioned above, this strategy also doesn’t make sense at all.

 

• Improving accuracy first and then speed: This seems to be the last and only feasible option. In fact, it does make sense as well. During the initial phase of JEE preparation, students must focus primarily on accuracy because it is more important to solve the problem correctly rather than solve the problem fast, but incorrectly. During the initial phase, students should focus a lot on acquiring knowledge, learning concepts, formulae, strategies and corner cases. Those students who don’t focus on these parameters tend to face challenges because not being able to solve problems during the early stage leads to demotivation which is one of the worst problems you can get into.

 

So, the right strategy is to focus for first few months primarily on getting things done correctly. You should aim to solve a lot of problems from as many sources as possible. You should spend a lot of time in thinking and coming up with a right solution. It may often take you hours to think of the solution. However, at least during the initial phase, this time is totally worth because it helps you improve your thinking and problem-solving skills.

Later on, when you are comfortable and you are confident that you will be able to crack various types of problems, you should focus on getting it done faster. There are two good strategies to improve your speed:

• Time yourself: This is the best and the easiest strategy. Whatever you do - make sure that you measure it. This way you will know that if you took 10 minutes to solve an easy problem, then there is something wrong and it needs to be improved.
• Plan a lot: For instance, while solving the paper, you should decide on which subject you want to target first. If say you are strong at Physics, go for it first. Being able to solve Physics quickly is going to not only give you a head start, but also it will help you improve your confidence level for the rest of the paper. This will surely give you a speed boost-up.

 

There is one more metric that you should keep a track of - the number of silly mistakes. The most important compromise that students do while improving their speed is that their number of silly mistakes shoots up. This is expected because when you try to do things fast, you happen to misread as well as misinterpret things. Either of them leads to a silly mistake. Therefore, knowing the root cause of the problem and the kind of silly mistakes you make is going to help you a lot in rectifying those mistakes. For instance, if you know that you make a lot of mistakes in reading the question, you should practice that part a lot. This will help you in reducing the error-rate.

To summarize, focus first on getting things right, then on getting things done fast and lastly on getting things done correctly and fast.

About the Author:

Aman Goel is co-founder at a Tech Start-up. He holds a BTech in Computer Science Engineering from IIT Bombay with a JEE Advanced AIR 33 (Year 2013).

During his free time, he enjoys writing articles/blogs. He is an Entrepreneur, Coder, Speed-cuber, gamer, and fan of Air crash investigation!

 

 

 

 

 

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