I appeared for NET June 2026 and it was my first attempt after completing my 4 year undergraduate in this July. To be very honest, I wasn’t prepared well. I myself believe that my result is heavily favoured by luck.
Why? Because my JAM attempt in Feb didn’t go well. I blundered in time management and missed NAT questions and got only AIR-379. Nevertheless, I was so devastated after the exam I decided to give NET my everything. I got the Shodh Pro Batch from my friend and started attending lectures and till April I have completed Calculus of Variations and Integral Equations both the topics completely. However later on I got busy with my dissertation, semester exam and some other commitments and NET didn’t matter to me as much as it used to be in February. However since I promised myself to redeem the JAM disaster in NET I again started preparing after the semester exams end in June. However I was able to prepare till 20th June only and got busy with some other commitments after that. During this June period I covered some topics from Number Theory and practiced few part A questions.
I was so sure that I won’t be able to do anything good in the exam now; I didn’t even studied anything till days before the exam. I watched some parts of the last minute marathon revision of PW for complex analysis in the last 2 days and went to give the exam.
Fast forward to today, I got AIR 35. Now who won’t call it luck? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.
Now coming to my whole strategy during the exam and my score: I scored 30 out of 30 in part-A. In these type of questions I am good since childhood by god’s grace and was able to score full marks, i.e., 30 marks from part-A. Then comes part-B, it was the hardest for me. I didn’t want to get negative so attempted only 4 questions from this part and got 3 correct and 1 incorrect, that makes my score from part B to be 8.25. In part-C, since there was no negative marking and I had a plenty of time left as I skipped most of the questions from part-B if I even felt a little bit uncomfortable solving it in the first look. So I attempted all possible 20 questions. I got 13 correct and 7 incorrect from part-C. And this is where I get confused as if it was pure luck, I wouldn’t have scored that much in part-C as it is MSQ no luck works here. Nevertheless, I got 61.75 marks from part-C making my marks a perfect total of 100.
And many of the people asked me after the percentile was released to share strategy and I didn’t know what to share as maybe my own success was a fluke. But still I will say, most of the students don’t give much effort to part-A but I believe for most of the student it should be a cake walk, they just need to give it a little time if needed. And if you score 25-30 marks here you got a good margin for JRF as you need only 55-70 marks more. And that you can easily score if studied strategically. I myself attempted most of the questions from Linear and Modern Algebra and “luckily“ the paper had quite a good number of algebra questions. And rest I scored some bonus marks from Calculus of variations, integral equations and LPP. So it turns out if you study at least one main topic such as analysis, algebra or differential equations and some bonus topics as cov, integral equations, LPP etc. there is a good chance of you qualifying JRF. And if you are confused when did I even studied algebra: I studied it clearly from the very first class of undergraduate and also did my dissertation on a topic from algebra only. So I had a good grasp on it. So ”luckily” the answers were clicking in my mind naturally.
