It's been over an year since I posted in this blog, and a lot has happened since. It can be roughly categorized into three phases- The boards, JEE, and College.

The Boards: We wrote a bunch of Pre-Board exams before the real ones. Question setters are not a very active people; they usually repeat previous year questions. The pre-boards are obviously set in the same fashion, so every student would be acquainted with most questions during the finals.
The physics paper was the only unexpected one, with a  bunch of 'high-level' questions, and so little time to answer them. A few people left the hall in tears, and later that day we heard of an online leak of the paper only the day before. This infuriated quite a lot of people, and there were some demands to have a re-exam. Thankfully, we didn't have one.

JEE: After we were done with the boards, we had JEE Mains in 15 days. FIITJEE classes were held; but there wasn't much attendance. Most of the students travelled to Coimbatore as they were writing the offline version. By the end of April, everyone had finished with Mains and moved on to Advanced preparation.
Meanwhile, there were the other admission tests: BITSAT, VITEE (Supposed to be pronounced 'Witty'), and the SRM, Amrita ones. All of them were boring, as expected. I slept for over an hour during VITEE.
Then came May, the JEE month. Students all over the country were preparing hard. Some were casually going through their textbooks; some were attending last minute Crash-courses; and the rest were doing their 2nd/3rd/4th revision.
A little diversion here: I somehow got selected for the IOITC, the Informatics Training Camp, and it was 20 days before JEE. I didn't give a damn to the JEE, as I had my priorities. My math teacher called me and asked if I really wanted to go -- considering we had JEE coming up so soon-- but I said I was prepared well enough. (Well, enough as in I couldn't prepare more). I enjoyed the camp, except for the day our Mains marks came. My mother was disappointed, and I tried to change her mind saying I'd prepare a lot for Advanced as soon as I came back.
The day before JEE came, and I wondered what everyone was doing. I had printed online cheatsheets for Physics, and made a futile attempt at mugging them, but failed. I started reading HP7 instead. Didn't make my mom too happy.
We wrote JEE, and everyone was generally happy with it. Then came the keys. I shall not go into further details.
We had a month of 'freedom' before we got our results. Not everyone was happy with them. I had made a rather pessimistic prediction a few months before about the results, but we had done far worse than that.

College: A lot of F1-ers opted for the IITs --Mechanical, Computer Science, Naval etc.-- and the rest mostly for SRM/VIT/NITs. And one student went to IIIT-Hyderabad.
The third phase of this year -- college -- I can't speak for all. The 'F1' part of this blog ends here. Now that I said it, I have the liberty to write about different things. A bit more about myself now.
I found IIIT-H to be an amazing place. The pace of things perfectly suited me. We had this awesome course where we started with defining NAND and NOR gates, and ended with processor design and assembly language. There was only one course I hated. Electrical Science. I didn't see how analysing circuits was in any way related to analysing code, or how it would help at all in anything I do in the future. I started learning some other things by my own (like Python, Android Dev, and stuff) and slept in classes. Our Midsems weren't so hard (which was disappointing, as I like hard papers). I want to point out an exception --Electrical Science-- but that subject doesn't deserve any more space in my blog.
Endsems were pretty much the same. This was followed by 4 days of Jeevan Vidya, a shivir about Human Values. No comments about that.

3 weeks later, and 2 days before I leave for college, I sit in front of my computer, publishing this blogpost.

Some advice to juniors: Prepare for the olympiads, kids.

Board Exams vs JEE

Ah. Freedom.
It's been months since I last posted here. To my defence, for the last 4 months, I was thrown into a whirlpool of revision tests, pre-boards, cluster exams, and mock practicals. Not to mention we had FIITJEE classes too in between. Yesterday's physics practicals were a grand culmination of the wake-up-daily-at-3 routine.
In fact, Pandit sir even warned us back then.

Yep, I'm cocky too.

Problem is, even when we were given holidays to study (ya know, Sundays and all), I wasted them. I'm not the hard-working type. Not even half of it. So, while my friends used all that time to perfect their NCERT marks, I was preparing for the coding counterpart of INMO , and the GMPs and all those things. Anything but boring NCERT. We had our first Full Test (AITS) recently, and I was one of the only few who wrote it.

 Of course, we no longer had the comfort of having our FIITJEE teachers correcting the papers, so naturally, one could only get a 70+ mark with a lot of cramming. I was forced to wake up at 3 in the morning (on the day of the exam) to study. That worked, since I'm 300% more efficient at that time (really... no TV, Computer etc. etc.) for a few exams, but as time progressed, I started to sleep again at 4.

Then, as lazy guys do, I found the ultimate solution to getting good marks in exams with only 2-3 hours of study. The method I employed was a 100% success. The chemistry HOD even wrote 'Good' on my paper. Pandit sir had given us this method.

The secret? I mugged the answers to last year's sample papers. There were 3 for chemistry. My pre-board 2 questions were a linear combination of those questions. My evaluator was obviously impressed by the elegant solutions I had written. Obviously, this is valid for the other subjects too- but they are less theoretical. I don't claim that you can ace any exam by mugging the past-year-questions. I've not done enough research. But PanditJi seems to have done so, and he says the same. They recycle questions from the last 10 years.

Okay, I'll leave all that school stuff, and get to the real deal. Remember I said we had classes too in the last 4 months? Well, almost no one attended them. There were a couple of classes with a record attendances of 8 and 7, that too from both F1 and F2 sections put together. My inner heart told me that I'd rather go to school, than sit at home and laze around, so I did. And I did a good thing, too. Whoever attended wrote a bunch of mock-AITses and a thorough, almost personal, test analysis (Low attendance, yay).

My ranks slowly, gradually started improving in the AITS. On the other hand, that doesn't mean anything, because the number of people writing it became one fourth (12k to 3k) in 4 exams. I can't tell how my performance is relative to my peers, because almost none of them are writing it.

I have one question. Dumping NCERT (I mean getting 470ish out of 500, instead of 485) for JEE Advanced preps is understandable, but the other way around? I don't get it. If you do, please enlighten me.