Test Series : The Big Gun

Hi readers, Kshitij here.

Having mentioned "Test Series" in one of the earlier posts let's delve deeper into the necessity of a Test Series and most importantly how to extract the best out of it so as to improve your performance.

So again let's start with the fundamental question "Why do I need a Test Series? Is solving books not sufficient?" The answer is a plain "No". The reason is simple. JEE won't ask you routine problems. The problems involve multi-dimensional thinking at a time. You need to use concepts of stoichiometry in a multi-step organic synthesis to predict the percent purity and stereochemistry of the final product. Sounds daunting? It would do only till you are not used to these kinds of unforeseen situations where you need to act quick, taking into consideration every aspect along with accuracy. This is where a Test Series comes into the picture. It is a set of test papers designed to make the student comfortable with all possible varieties of questions along with the various ways in which the same question can be put in order to make the student sweat in the exam hall. 

Remeber the "Decimal-Type Numeric" questions asked in JEE Advanced 2018? which made most of the student suffer had featured already in FIITJEE AITS for JEE 2018. People who took the test series were well aware of how to attempt the questions. Ever heard of "Multiple Correct Integer Answer Type Questions" wherein a question may have any number of integers from 0 to 9 as the answer(Say answer to a question may be 2,3,5,7,9 and you need to enter all of these to get full marks) with a daunting marking scheme of +4/-2. It might feature in coming years in JEE but has already featured in my of my Resonance Tests.

So by the time you convince yourself about joining a test-series, another question pops up, which one? There are a lot of them available in the market? Well, there is no defined answer to it. All of them be it Resonance, Allen, FIITJEE, Narayana, Bansal, Vibrant or Aakash are good in one form or the other. Some are good for their cracking and mind-blowing questions, while some are known for their well-designed schedule to be highly student friendly. It becomes a difficult task to choose one, but there is a simple rule to do so. First of all, analyze the syllabus distribution of all, its availability in your city/town, fee-structure, level of papers (try to refrain from ones having very easy or very tough papers) and the number of tests in an academic session (15-20 tests are good enough).

For those students already enrolled in a reputed Coaching Institute, there is hardly any need to join any other test-series. Just make sure to do the papers of your institute sincerely and you should be good to go. While for others, decide carefully, take reviews from people before investing your time and money somewhere. If you want to know my pick, I did Resonance and FIITJEE AITS. The former is, in my opinion, the ideal test series for it is well in accordance with the syllabus, as well as has questions at par with the prevailing level of questions asked in the actual exam, not to low neither too high. 

So the first part is done. We have selected the test series, but the job is yet to start. Just giving test papers every fortnight and leaving them as it is after the paper is doing no justice to its purpose. Unless you analyze your mistakes and strengths from a test the test-paper is merely a booklet with no use. I remember spending the entire Sunday I had a test and a couple of days to follow in finding answers to the problems I wasn't able to solve, or those which went wrong, researching the web and books to learn some new concepts. It requires a lot of patience, determination and the right approach to analyze a paper and learn from one's mistakes.

The basic way to analyze a paper is to divide the paper into two parts: Questions which you did correctly and questions which you got wrong or did not attempt. So this forms the first branch of the tree. Coming to the first one "The Questions attempted correctly", there are instances when you manage to get the answer just by guessing or eliminating the options. However, this is a very wrong practice unless it's the final exam. So the first step would be to find proper solutions to those problems. Having ensured this make sure to have a look at solutions provided along with the paper to those questions which you solved correctly just to ensure that you are equipped with other possible methods to solve a problem. 

The second part has further subdivisions, first being "Wrong Answers" and "Unattempted Questions". Let's consider the first one. You may get a question wrong due to broadly 2 ways namely Silly Mistakes and Conceptual mistakes. 

The first one is easy to find, it comprises all mistakes done in hurry, say, calculation mistakes, using the wrong formula, using the long approach and getting mixed up in middle, reading the wrong data etc. The only solution to it is "concentration" while solving the paper. Don't think about anything while giving the test, neither what the person next to you is doing nor about the result. Just focus on reading the question properly and solving carefully. 

The second requires a significant amount of research so as to pinpoint the topic you need to work upon. Say you weren't able to solve a question from Coordinate Geometry. First part of investigation done. So first figure out what were the different conics involved there. Say you figure out to be a question involving Parabola and Circle. Great! The second part of investigation done too. Next, what in Parabola? Tangents and their properties. Okay so that's it the investigation is over and now you understand that you need to work upon Tangents, their equations, properties etc (as related to the question). Now that you know where exactly you need to work, just pick up any resource and go through it once. Compare the process you adopted and the standard one and in almost all cases you will find your mistake here.

The second point in this list is questions which you didn't attempt. Again, there may be many reasons for it. Two major being "not able to read/solve the question in time" the solution to which is to increase your reading and solving speed by doing more problems at home and the second same as doing a conceptual mistake, this time not being able to solve the question due to lack of proper understanding. The solution is same as mentioned in the above paragraph.

  
Phew! That was too much of branching. Hope you didn't find it overwhelming :P
So, here's a summary of all what I mentioned. (Forgive me for the poor picture quality :P). Hope you find it informative and helpful to increase your confidence while attempting further papers after such a rigorous exercise after the previous.

That's all from my side. Do comment your queries below.

All the Best!