How I got AIR 55 JAM & AIR 26 JEST with BSc level Physics

Hi guys,

I’m Bala Kumar. This is a short and to the point description of how I went about preparing for JAM and JEST. [Check out the elaborate posts here if that’s what you are looking for]

• IIT JAM Preparation-Vaibhav Sharma (AIR – 5)
• On preparing for IIT-JAM Physics -Niket Shah (AIR – 6)

I started preparing 7-8 months before JAM and I’d say that’s more than enough time to easily crack the exam. I took coaching from Career Endeavor but I’d say it’s not worth it because they go slowly and in a haphazard manner. I’d highly recommend their books though.

Sources

First things first, if recommend starting off with

• Khan Academy videos on vector calculus: To get a good intuition for curl, divergence, and gradient. This will help you a lot with EMT and vector calculus.
• R Shankar’s lectures on YouTube. His lectures will help build a great foundation.
• Career endeavor material to read up on Kinetic theory of gases, Maxwell equations(thermodynamics), statistical mechanics (basically any topic that Shankar doesn’t cover, read through career endeavor material).
• Khan Academy videos on doppler and organ pipes.
• For Ray optics, once you’re done with Shankar, watch some IIT-JEE videos on lens combination formulae.

Old Papers

Once you’re confident that you know a topic, do past year JAM questions, they’re a good way of testing your concepts. Remember you don’t have to do every topic. If you feel you’re having to memorize too much (this will be a problem later), leave a few topics. Towards the end, I just solved the past year JAM papers including the subjective ones and the career endeavor papers. If you aren’t preparing for JEST or TIFR, don’t go into too much in the depths of quantum mechanics, Shankar should be enough.

For JEST

I just watched the 3rd and 4th lectures of the theoretical minimum series on classical mechanics by Leonard Susskind which was the only extra prep I did specifically for JEST. But I wouldn’t recommend this kind of prep for JEST, I just got lucky that some of the topics they typically ask from weren’t asked this time.

[Refer to the excellent and elaborate posts below for a JEST preparation]

I’d finally like to say that memorize as little as possible because, well the whole charm of physics is in understanding the underlying concepts and this helps greatly with the tricky questions that may come your way. There isn’t too much depth in these topics but a lot of breadth so memorizing a lot of stuff might get you confused about what formulae to use.
Best of luck.