JEE is easy

The JEE coaching system is bullshit and harmful. Here’s an easier way.

What I did

I cleared the JEE exam in an extremely unconventional manner. I skipped 2/3rds of the entire Chemistry syllabus. I also skipped a few topics in Math and Physics. I did not memorize a single formula (other than fundamental laws/principles) and I barely solved any practice questions.

Also, I studied for only ~1 year, ran away from my boarding school/coaching centre and for the last 8 months before the exam, I stayed home binging Netflix and Wikipedia instead of going to school.

My rank after all this - 1505 (general, no reservation). Pretty good for an exam written by a million people.

Now compare that to what most people who get ranks under 3000 do:

1. Study 10-14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 2-5 years
2. Memorise a massive list of formulae (> 5K) and facts
3. Solve an insane number of questions (10K-30K) to the point of memorising question types and their solutions
4. No social life, no fun, pure cramming

Okay how?

The core difference in my approach is that I spent an unreasonable amount of time on conceptual understanding and zero time on rote memorisation.

• Understand the concepts deeply, and practice ~10 difficult questions per chapter. (That’s all I did. This is enough for all of Physics, most of Maths and a third of chemistry.)
• To understand the concepts, I had a book where I broke down each and every concept. (I didn’t know any formulae by heart, but I could derive every single one of them.)
• Skip the rest of the chapters. (I skipped all the memorisation heavy stuff - all of inorganic and organic chemistry, integral calculus, etc.)

Now the best part. The hardest thing back then was not having anyone who could answer my doubts (most teachers do not understand the concepts at the depth I am talking about). But today you have LLMs that can. You don’t have to scour discussion forums on the internet for every concept, or pirate and search through 10GB of undergrad/postgrad level books like I did. Fire up o4-mini-high or gemini-2.5-pro and you’re sorted.

Warning

I must stress this - you need to obsess over understanding concepts at a depth you’ve never done before. A good metric is being able to derive all formulae from scratch and being able to intuitively understand college level concepts of the same topic. This still requires spending a lot of time studying but it is atleast an order of magnitude lesser than what is traditionally done - a few hours a day for about a year is enough.

This strategy works if you want a ~600 or lower rank. (In my year, it would have been enough for ~300 rank. I made a bunch of silly mistakes that landed me 1500). However, if you want to get a rank below ~100, you’d have to take the “best of both worlds” approach. Memorise the rest of chemistry and solve a lot of questions for a few topics like integral calculus.

If you choose the “best of both worlds” approach, be wary of how much rote memorisation you do. It makes you stupid. Solving a lot of problems sort of mitigates this by forcing you to think, but its still superficial thinking (“How do I manipulate this question so that it fits into this formula I memorised”).

P.S. This “blindly memorise everything and work insanely hard” mentality that the JEE coaching industry promotes is extremely harmful to you and society. It breeds rat-race loving prestige-chasers who often end up in roles that negatively affect society. It also squashes both your contrarian and critical thinking skills and leaves a mental toll that takes a long time to heal.

Todo: Add some proofs so that people believe its actually doable. Maybe explain how to go deep with an example so its more clear? Also add a section explaining the context behind JEE for those who are unaware.