Do you know any short tricks for IIT JEE and AIEEE to crack maths objective questions? This is the question sent to me by one of the ‘desi’ blog reader from Malaysia and is duly included for this post.
While I knew for sure that there are shortcuts in doing B Tech except for writing semester exams e.g. attendance proxies, copying of engg drawing, practicals, projects reports, class tests and what not. I didn”t know that this copying phenomenon has existed since time immemorial as one of my colleague (a native German engg graduate) narrated that way back in 1971 (when modern technologies like photocopy machine, digital cameras were not available even to western world) , how one of his class mate asked fellow student to write the practicals report on behalf of himself.
Coming back to engg entrance exams, I was of the firm opinion that if such need for shortcuts existed in real world- there has to be a real world solution for this problem on Google (inspired by Subhas Chandra Boses clinching one liner to glory: Give me blood-I promise you freedom; in todays world my one liner is: Give me Google -I promise you nuclear bomb). It hardly took few seconds on Google when I found a websites advertising How to do 30% of AIEEE exam in 20 minutes? (refer http://preps.youmarks.com/index.php?ind=news&op=news_show_category&idc=3)
Then I came across a maths magician, Mr Vijay Joglekar (Joglekar Methematics Centre) from Ujjain (M.P.) who has developed magic tricks to solve maths problems for IIT JEE , AIEEE, and a few state CET exams. A review of these claims followed by actually looking at their sample tricks (one can have a sample of the Joglekar’s magic trick from iitjeeaieeedotcom.
Moreover, it will be worthwhile to buy 5-10 mock tests (the ones that give hints/solutions as well), solve them yourself and then check the shortcut way to solve them. There are many such resources available online that provide mock tests with shortcuts solutions.
After going through a lot of such tricks, I concluded that these tricks can be useful as they all are originating from commonsense achieved by reading/teaching the subject for years. One example of magic tricks for solving algebraic eqn is to start solving it with one variable (x,y,z) value of 1, -1 & 0.
My sense is that about 5 questions from IIT JEE and about 10 questions from AIEEE maths can be easily solved in minutes by applying these tricks. This could potentially add 10-15 marks in JEE and 20-25 marks in AIEEE . These additional 15 marks can bring up IIT JEE rank from 5000 to 3500 (or from 1500 to 1000) . In AIEEE, additional 25 marks can bring up the rank from10000 to 5000 (or from 2000 to 1000 at top end). There are a couple of videos on youtube on the success of Joglekar’s magic tricks. Watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZBAjl02MJM
Conclusion: These tricks can be very useful in improving rank in engineering entrance exams. Moreover, they are available at tiny cost starting from Rs 500. They are useful guide for the students to solve the Maths problems with minimum calculations to increase speed and accuracy to score high under time limitation. However, such trick material should be used as icing on the cake and should not be confused with the cake itself.
Disclaimer: I have no relations whatsoever with any of the above discussed professionals.