How Toppers Study – Proven Scientific Tips For NEET Preparation

What do you think about students who top competitive examinations like NEET? Do you know How Toppers Study for NEET examination? What characteristics make them different from the rest. Some of the most common answers I get from students are below.

Video Lecture – How Toppers Study

Transcript for Video

They are born with natural talent with high IQ. Topper’s study all throughout the day and late in the night. They don’t sleep well as they have to wake up early in the morning to study. They refer a lot of books for each subject. This is just a partial list. The list just goes on and on.

Common Myth of Average Students About Toppers

Most of the toppers both in NEET and IIT Joint Entrance Examinations have shared that what the average student thinks about them are not true. They are not deprived of sleep and do not sacrifice everything in life to get a good score in NEET. In fact, they say that they sleep and play like other students. The key difference lies between toppers and others lies in the learning methodology and techniques they use.

Expert Knowledge Is Conditioned

Toppers have not only acquired knowledge, but they are also good at retrieving the knowledge that is relevant to a particular task. Cognitive scientists say that knowledge of an expert differs from the normal person. Expert’s Knowledge is always conditioned, which means that it includes a specification of the contexts in which it is useful. The knowledge that is not conditioned is often useless because it is never activated, even though it is relevant to the problem.

Let me explain this with an experiment conducted using college students. The college students were asked to memorize the following story on how a general captures a fortress. The story goes as follows.

General Capturing Fortress Story

A general wants to capture a fortress which is located in the center of a country. There are many roads which lead to the fortress.  All roads which lead to the fortress, are mined in such a way that when a large group of people walks on them, they will bombard the mines. So the general divided his army into smaller groups and asked them to pick different roads which lead to the fortress. All the groups converged at the fortress and captured the fortress. Students were given time to memorize this information and asked to solve the following problem.

Patient With Tumor Problem

The problem goes like this.  Consider yourself as a doctor and you have a patient who has a tumor in the stomach. The patient will die if his tumor is not removed but the patient is not in a position to handle surgery. The tumor can be destroyed by passing rays of high intensity but unfortunately, surrounding tissues will be damaged when high-intensity rays are passed. What procedure will you adopt to destroy the tumor with rays without affecting the tissues?

Many students were not able to answer this question because they were not able to apply what they learned in general capturing fortress context into this tumor context. When the same set of students were told to use information from fortress context into the tumor, nearly 90% of the students were able to perceive the analogy between dividing the troops into small groups and using a small dose of rays and make them converge on the tumor. Each ray is too weak to harm tissue except at the point of convergence. Despite the relevance of the fortress problem to the tumor problem, students could not spontaneously transfer their learning from one context into another context.

How Experts / Toppers Attempt Problem Solving

In another physics learning experiment, a group of experts was asked to describe verbally their approach to solve a physics problem. They mentioned major laws or principles in physics. They also came up with the reason for why and how the laws should be applied.  Later, the same question is asked to normal physics graduates.  The graduates told equations and how they should substitute values in order to get the result. This research concluded that thinking of an expert seems to be more organized around ideas and concepts in physics. But, thinking of normal people tend to solve problems by memorizing, recalling and manipulating equations.

Toppers Know More

Everyone agrees that students who clear NEET know more than rest of the students. But everyone is not clear what “knowing more” means. Knowing more does not mean they know more concepts than the normal student.  Topper’s concepts are linked with other related concepts more than the normal students. This is what helps them to apply in problem-solving contexts.

Some students would do well on classroom assignments and believe that they are learning well. These students will be surprised when they take tests like NEET. Problems from the entire course are randomly presented in competitive examinations like NEET.  There will be no clues about which chapter they appeared in a textbook. One of the major issue faced by students while facing exams like NEET is that they are not clear which formulae to use. This happens because, the students cannot correctly identify which chapter the problem belongs to. Their organization of formulas has a strong association with chapter than the concepts which spread across the book.

Key Summary

• Toppers are not born with intelligence, they improve their memory and thinking skill to become topper. They play and sleep like any other student.
• Experts knowledge is conditioned whereas normal student knowledge is scattered and not connected to other concepts.
• If you want to apply your learning, then you have to understand what you learn not just memorize the concepts.
• A lot of Surprise and Disgust is waiting for someone who directly appears in competitive exams like NEET without any practice.