Since ‘JEE’ means both JEE mains and JEE advanced, I would like to share my experiences of both the exams.
Interestingly in my case, both the days were contrasting to each other. I was quite confident of my JEE mains preparations; and was actually awaiting the exam day.
I was extremely relaxed on ‘the night before the exam”. And then finally came the day. 3/04/2016. Carrying many expectations on my head, I entered the exam hall. I was confident of myself, and had expected that I wouldn’t face any ‘exam pressure’. But that’s where I had made the mistake.
Call it overconfidence or call it ignorance, I started the paper badly. I made a slow start, relaxed. My answers were hardly matching with the options given. The first hour of the exam had gone and I was wondering what was wrong. Then it struck upon me that ‘exam pressure’ was playing its role.
I tried to calm down and solve the easy ones first. But I found every question to be difficult and just went through the paper so many times. Very soon, two hours were gone and I had not even solved half of the paper. Then perhaps for the first time in my life I felt what exam pressure is like. I tried hard to complete as much as I could in the last hour. But it was always not going to be sufficient; and I ended up leaving about 15–18 easy questions of Mathematics.
I knew that I would still be easily qualifying JEE Main but it was a great mental setback to my preparations. I started to study the basics again for JEE Advanced. But this time I wasn’t so relaxed; finally I had a taste of what exam pressure is. Besides, this time around there was the added pressure that this exam was the gateway to my dream, getting into a good IIT.
So as I said, the situation before the exam was contrasting to what it used to be usually. And then, 22/05/2016. The day. This time I was a bit tensed, ‘night before the exam’ hadn’t been so comfortable. But anyway, I gave the paper, this time putting my full effort from the first minute. I won’t describe it in detail, but it went better than mains. And that was reflected in my result, getting AIR 752.
This was my story of both the exam days – JEE Main and JEE Advanced, two very different cases. But as they say, All’s well that ends well!!
This taught me one important lesson, not to be overconfident ever. After all, some tension is good for your purpose, as it proved in my case!
Shreyas Maheshwari
IIT Bombay
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