Spoiler alert: My percentile won't get me anywhere. But hey, at least it's a good start for session 2! :D
The days before the exam
I had been preparing for 2 years before the exam, starting from 11th grade. While I wasn't exactly proficient with portions from 11th grade, I looked forward to compensate by spending more time to study in 12th grade. I was mostly successful with it aside from slight procrastinations here and there, but school work often kept me busy. From around november, I started solving questions from my previous years' book until the final day of the exam. I managed to complete a few chapters from other books that focused solely on physics or chemistry too. However, no matter how hard I studied, I never seemed to score above 100 out of 300 in mock tests and sometimes frustratingly even scored less than 50 which really affected my mental state seeing others score above 150-200.
But if it weren't for my parents, my sister and my mentor, I don't think I'd be here typing out this post right now. They encouraged me to keep studying and that is exactly what I did. Soon enough, exactly the day before the exam, I managed to score 157 in a reasonably hard test I took on embibe which sure did boost my confidence!
The day of the exam
27th January, 2024.
Finally, it was the day of the exam. I woke up late after exactly 9 hours of sleep, had breakfast with my family and got to revising. I read through important formulas I had scribbled out in my notebooks, read a few pages from my chemistry textbook and looked through solutions of certain model questions all while trying to contain my anxiety and fear. Once the clocked striked 1 pm, I left home to the exam centre. From there, I stood in a long queue and then finally got to my seat less than an hour later. There was yet again an hour to wait for the actual exam to start. Unlike most movie cliches, instead of thinking about my family and friends, I was trying to recall all the formulas I've learnt and strategies I'd kept in my mind. And then the exam began.
I immediately clicked on the physics section and started solving. It was actually mostly easy and I was able to attempt around 22 questions. I then switched to chemistry and found it rather easy too. I was able to attempt 21 questions over there. As for math, I used all the tricks I had in my sleeve, including testing options to get the correct answer like for example, differentiating one of the options to get the solution to an integration question and managed to attempt 5 questions. Any more than that felt like a risk that wasn't worth taking. The difficulty of the paper was actually concerning (and rightfully so, you'll see why as you read) which made me want to attempt some wild guesses for the remaining 7 questions in the side of physics and chemistry, but I didn't take the risk for that either.
10 minutes remaining. This is when my actual anxiety that was pretty much suppressed started to kick in. I frantically flipped through each section searching for questions I may still be able to answer but there wasn't any. I was tempted to guess some questions with closed eyes but ultimately I decided not to. And with that, the timer ran out and I sat for around half an hour for the final procedures to complete. I then took a bus ride home, ate a burger and spent a few minutes chatting with my friends on how the exam went for me.
The day of the result
13th February, 2024.
The result was supposed to come out the day before. But I woke up in the morning at around 6 am to a bright mobile screen with my result displayed on it held by my mom right next to my face. I was surprised to say the least.
Up until this point, I refused to count my score after the test thinking I'd score only around 90 marks and I thought I'd be let down with around 88%ile, but I was actually quite happy seeing my result. Sure, it's nowhere near good enough to get a seat for computer science in any college JEE can offer, but it was enough to motivate me to keep pushing, considering I've been through hell trying to get into a coaching centre in the first place and working my way from there. I was also blessed to have parents that didn't have the 'sharmaji ka beta' syndrome, and in contrary, were actually happy to see my result and assured me that I'd do even better the next time (thanks mom and dad!)
Analysis
The following night I sat down and counted the score for each question, and I approximately had scored around 155-165 marks... which is actually pretty insane if you think about it. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who happened to write the same shift I did, scored 99.91%ile with around 256 marks which then made complete sense to me. However, each shift seemed to be harder than before, to the point where you'd need around 150-160 marks for the 2nd shift on January 31st to score 99%ile, which was also really strange. The ones that received their shift on 27th and 29th were at a disadvantage considering how easy it was. Normally 150 marks for the years before 2023 would get you around 98%ile (mostly) but this exam proved to be very different.
In total, I actually had only got 3 questions wrong in chemistry, 3 in physics and none in math (approximately) which gives me a score of 164 out of 300. From my percentile above, it's clear that chemistry is what I need to focus more on, targetting a perfect 100% and maybe a bit of math as well. If I had taken a wild guess of 10 questions in my last minute anxiety, I probably wouldn't have scored better considering the statistics generated below from a python program I made:
(The program generates 10 questions per test. The random number generator assigns a number from 1 to 4 as an answer to each question, and the generator is used again to determine a wild guess for each question. If the guess is the same as the answer, 4 marks are awarded otherwise 1 mark is deducted. In this case, I've set the program to run 100 tests)
I'm definitely looking forward to score more on the next session and update you guys with some actual good news while juggling with my board exam preparation. As always, thanks for taking your time to read this post! :D