How and why do entrance exams like JEE expect students to understand the concepts, and not just remember the formulas to solve the problems?
The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is indeed one of the toughest exams worldwide for selection into the undergraduate programs in Indian colleges. IIT’s are the most sought after institutes offering the best learning experience at the undergraduate level.
This experience students crave for is nothing but the outcome of the amazing research going on in Science and Technology at various labs and supervised by the professors at IIT’s. These are the same professors who make questions for JEE (Advanced).
Now, is it not justified for the best institutes to select the best out of all candidates as their students? After all the professors would like to teach students who have strong concepts of basic sciences and not those who can simply plug in formulae to get the results, then what’s the difference between an illogical machine and a logical human brain?
It might sound a bit crude that the difficulty of questions is kept far above the N.C.E.R.T textbook level and yet students are expected to solve them.
It is true, but it is also true that they have to somehow differentiate between students who learn conceptually and those who don’t. If all questions just require memorization and application of the formulae, everyone will be able to score high and everyone will be selected, irrespective of the fact whether they have a thinking aptitude or not.
Also, there is a balance of easy, medium, and difficult level questions in JEE. Those students who are able to solve those questions involving fundamental understanding and a strong grasp of concepts are able to score much better. It is needless to say that these outperforming candidates have the aptitude that IIT professors look for in their students.
Now coming to how such questions are formed which expect students to think deep and not just remember the formula. The list of formulae given in the NCERT textbooks is limited but the theory explained is not. Every single line, like the statement of the Work-Energy theorem, carries fundamental importance. In JEE, most questions are based on the application of the theory.
Professors mostly have research ongoing when they are setting questions, so if something new or interesting comes up and they think that it can be explained on the basis of the theory described in NCERT, it goes into the question paper in a simplified form.
Sometimes questions are made out of the most neglected portions/lines from the book which has just been started and not explained very well. The key idea is to test how thoroughly the candidate has grasped all the concepts in the book.
So this is briefly about the title of this blog. Perhaps this will help in your JEE preparation.
I will add that I secured an All India rank of 220 and 492 in JEE Advanced and Mains respectively so whatever I have written is inspired by my personal experience as an IIT-JEE aspirant.
However, IIT-JEE tests the learning which you have received from real-life experiments and your observational skills. Here is a brilliant website [Learn Science through Experiments] for elementary and middle school students with interesting science experiments that would help you for sure