Engineering is one of the most preferred streams in India. In order to get admission in an esteemed institution, students start JEE preparation from an early age, but the main momentum picks up from Class 11. It’s also a highly recommended starting point because the syllabus resonates with the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains exam. As much as it’s crucial for a student to crack JEE Main, excelling in board exams is equally important. While some find it easy to balance the two, others struggle until they find a solution.
If you’re also a high school student thinking of kickstarting your JEE preparation, delve deeper into the insights shared by top rankers who managed to balance both because of an organised study plan and time management skills.
JEE Main 2025 UP girl topper Ananya Tripathi, who scored 271/300 with a 99.94 percentile, struggled with balancing school studies along with boards and JEE preparation. To overcome this challenge, she did proper planning by aligning her board exam syllabus with JEE Main preparation, saving a lot of time. “I created a daily task list and ensured that I followed it diligently. Synchronising my revision schedule with the test schedule helped me stay on track,” she told a media organisation.
Ananya allocated around 9–10 hours of her day to studies, with brief breaks in between. “Most of this time was spent revising class notes and completing homework assignments, while the rest was utilised for preparing for upcoming tests. Weekends were reserved for full-length mock tests and analysing my weaker areas,” she added.
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For JEE preparation, she relied heavily on her class notes, lectures, and NCERT books. Solving mock tests and previous years’ question papers, along with proper time management, paved her way into engineering.
Arka Banerjee, a 99.9 percentiler in JEE Main 2025 Session 2, believes that serious JEE preparation naturally covers the board syllabus. “I think if one sincerely prepares for JEE, the boards will be automatically covered. So I didn’t take any extra burden. I mainly focused on JEE prep. But towards the last week, I gave a little more attention to the other two subjects (except PCM) for the boards,” she told a media organisation.
Though Arka started her JEE preparation in Class 9, it was in Class 11 that she intensified her efforts. “I focused equally on all three subjects, PCM, and dedicated more time to the topics in which I felt weak. I gave regular mock tests and, most importantly, analysed my mistakes and took learnings from them,” she concluded.
Another achiever, IIT-JEE Advanced AIR 15 Daksh Tayaliya, has similar thoughts to Arka, “The Class 11 and 12 syllabi for boards and JEE are mostly the same. I focused on NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) textbooks, and just a week of preparation was enough for the boards. My school was very supportive, so I didn’t have any additional pressure,” he told a media organisation.
In conclusion, although the syllabi of JEE Main and Class 11 are not 100 per cent the same, the Class 11 syllabus stresses core understanding of Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics as per NCERT, while the JEE Main syllabus is based on Class 11 and 12 NCERT, with differences in reduction, merger, and higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills in JEE.
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