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JEE Main 2024 – Session 1 Expert Review: Physics

The JEE session 1 candidate responses have been released, which indirectly brings to us the official question papers of the various sessions of this year’s exam. Here is my take on the feel of the paper, interesting observations, and what we can expect from the next session. You can find the PDFs of this session’s question papers in this article.

For the last few years, the paper has been getting easier every time. This year’s papers are similar in difficulty to the 2023 sets, with Physics getting a touch easier and Math getting a touch difficult. In fact, many students have informed me that the Math paper was straightforward but took long to solve. This has however been compensated in Physics, with questions being very simple with no need of much analysis. There are a few questions in each session that required a moment’s thought or a diagram drawn, most of them in the integer section; these questions will act as ‘rank differentiators’ in the backdrop of the easier ones.

The weightage of grade XI and XII portions was nearly equal, but this indirectly means that grade XII is more important because it has less chapters in it for the same number of questions. For example, in the morning shift of the 27th January paper, there were 3 questions from current electricity and 3 from modern Physics, giving students 6 questions from 2 chapters that don’t require open-ended analysis. I feel that a similar pattern will follow in session 2 as well, perhaps with current replaced by induction or magnetostatics or another grade XII chapter. Of course, this is only conjecture, and surprises may always emerge.

The same session mentioned above has a question on the application of a spherometer. It is a beautiful instrument that can be used to measure the radius of a sphere that is too large to use Vernier calipers on. We will soon release a video on the functioning of a spherometer, and update this space when we do. However, there is no direct mention of spherometer in the curriculum that NTA released before the exam, so it remains to be seen if this question will be deleted. Most students must anyway have used a spherometer as part of their lab practical sessions in school.

As with any easy paper, there was plenty of chance to lose marks to the universally-feared ‘silly mistake’ phenomenon. Things like finding the distance of an object from the center of a planet, as opposed to its surface (chapter: gravity), or remembering that force can be zero even when a charge moves in a magnetic field (chapter: moving charges), are obvious to most of us, but in the context of a quick-paced Physics paper, might be overlooked.

In preparation for your next session I would recommend not thinking about this one irrespective of what score you got. Now that all of you have a taste of the environment of the exam, you know what you will face in a few weeks from now. Systematic and consistent preparation will get you through, and I hope most of you are in this process already.

All the best for all upcoming exams!

Subrahmanyam Chivukula
Faculty of Physics, Centum Academy
The author is a research graduate from the
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research,
Mohali.
08-02-2024