With the recent announcement that the admission in engineering colleges of Maharashtra, will happen through newer MHT-CET which shall be at par with JEE Main in difficulty level, students should now modify their preparation methodology.
In comparison to CET, JEE Main has thinking based questions and tests students on their conceptual knowledge of the subject. Though students targeting CET can still avoid very tough descriptive questions but they need to definitely understand the concepts in depth and raise their preparation upto JEE Main difficulty level. This, infact, is a blessing in disguise and will help students go beyond rote learning and superficial preparation which would eventually help them in becoming good engineers.
We, at Bakliwal Tutorials (BT), believe that the real purpose of education should be to enhance one’s intelligence and receptivity by delving into the subject rather than studying with an intention of conquering any exam. Hence, for good students, this announcement would not make much of a difference. Being conceptually sound, they were always able to fine tune their final preparation as per exam and were doing well in all exams like JEE, CET and Boards.
The CET paper pattern is also expected to undergo some changes in order to bring it as par with JEE Main difficulty level. Previously, CET was more of a speed game where in the first 90 minutes, students needed to solve 50, 1 mark questions, of Physics and Chemistry each and in the other 90 minutes, 50 questions of Math of 2 marks each. There was no negative marking. However, JEE has tougher questions, a student averagely gets 2 minutes per question and it also includes negative marking.
Though I personally believe that like some other states (Gujarat, MP etc), Maharashtra should also select students through JEE Main only for the state colleges but even increasing the difficulty level of CET is a welcome step. For Pune university colleges, it is a clear observation that students who get selected through 15% JEE Main quota fair better than the ones who get through CET, which proves the quality of intake through JEE Main. With this, the quality of students in state colleges shall definitely improve which shall boost placements and overall standards of engineering education.
All in all, with approx 9 months remaining (CET is conducted sometime in mid of May) for 12th appearing students, they still have enough time to work on their concepts and should not panic with this news. They should accept and appreciate this change and gear up accordingly.
Writer Vaibhav Bakliwal is an IITB alumnus, Vice President of coaching federation of India and director of Bakliwal Tutorials, which produced Maharashtra topper in JEE Main in January, 2020.