State board kids juggle syllabi to crack NEET

CHENNAI: Picture this - cramming pages of theory-heavy physics chapters for hours in the morning and switching to a number-studded version of the same lesson from the evening onwards. This is not a one-off thing but the daily reality for state board students who have to get through not only the state prescribed texts but also NCERT books simultaneously, where the same chapters are dealt with differently.
With the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) inching closer, state board students are putting in double the hours and juggling between different textbooks to make up for not having a CBSE-centric grounding involving a 'concept-based' approach as explained by educationists across the board.
But several coaching centres across the city have been witnessing state board students slowly catching up with their peers. They attribute this to special coaching sessions which are modeled specifically to transition them into the CBSE-centric NEET pattern. This includes 80% material from NCERT textbooks, 20% outsourced books, example-based teaching, phased-approach to subjects and of course longer hours.
"Although we conduct regular NEET coaching with students of all boards together, we have extra free coaching classes for just the state board students. They need much more training and practice to be acquainted with the new exam pattern and the special classes are working really well," says R Vijayan who heads Axent Academy in Anna Nagar. Currently, the medical aspirants from state schools have a dual responsibility preparing for their board exams which will carry a bulk of theory, and preparing for NEET in which 40 out of 45 questions from each section (physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics) are purely problems. But several other private centres too reveal that state board students are slowly catching up with their CBSE counterparts.
They said during previous years when pan-India medical entrance exam (AIPMT) was not compulsory, only a fraction of students in the city came in for coaching, which has increased nearly five-fold. Almost 75-80% of their mentorship is now exclusively for state board kids, who have multiplied in number across centres offering coaching for NEET.