My CUET Odyssey
My journey with CUET was overwhelming, to say the least, starting when my school and the whole nation shut down because of what brought online classes into existence - COVID 19. Taking classes on the internet, understanding how to operate Google Classroom, finding reasons for not switching on our camera while in class characterised the entire period. Yet I found myself caught in a personal quandary - deciding which subjects to pick for 11th grade. Since I've always considered myself to be a bright student, I was raised to feel pressured to perform well. I believed that science is what all geeky, nerdy people study, so I made the decision to continue with it. Chemical formulas, equations of quantum physics, blocks of Python coding, and mainly the loss of contact with my friends, hit me hard. Navigating through class 11th was quite difficult, but I survived.
Career problems became a major issue at the beginning of class 12th. Most of my peers already had a certain future plan. Being a science student, I felt limited to engineering courses, but the thought of continuing with these subjects after school was not appealing to me at all. I took several career counselling sessions, which were an utter waste of money. My parents and I had lengthy conversations before I made the decision to change my major to economics at DU. Apart from the fact that I detested physics, there was no specific rationale for this choice.
Until then, the admission criteria for DU was quite simple, score a ludicrous amount of marks and get admitted into the top colleges. However, life wouldn’t allow me to continue on this "simple" path. There were rumours about an entrance test for DU admissions. These anxiety provoking rumours were accompanied by another announcement. The fact that I would have to appear for 2 board exams, with one of them being MCQ based was quite frightening. Given the lack of information about the entrance exam, I decided to prioritise my preparations for the board exams, anticipating the possibility of the entrance test being cancelled. However, soon after my Term-1 boards, the news of this newly launched entrance exam for admission to all central universities was confirmed. This term, "CUET”, would resonate in my thoughts until the results came out.
The fact that I wasn't prepared to study for another exam right after finishing my boards made the preparation process difficult. The feeling of euphoria after finishing my exams didn’t last long this time. In our schools, we often have exams that require long written answers and require a lot of knowledge with the ability to think deeply about things, but CUET was different because it was an objective test. Finding appropriate questions and familiarising myself with the test pattern was another task. I decided to first complete the syllabus before concentrating on the question. I'd like to include a word of advice for all aspiring candidates right here: read the NCERT material carefully. To score full marks, all you need to do is use the NCERT textbooks and exemplar. I am in the position right now to say this, but during my preparation period I had no idea about the difficulty of the questions. An additional issue was that the proposed CUET date was in July, while my boards finished in June. So I had just one month to complete the entire syllabus and familiarise myself with MCQ solving. However, the actual exam dates were released in the second week of July, and my exam was supposed to be in August. With a sigh of relief, I began preparing more rigorously. I made the wise choice to purchase a course from CUET ADDA247, which provided me with a question bank and allowed me to time myself with mocks. For all four subjects, I gave more than thirty mocks.
There were two phases to my exam schedule. The night before my first exam, I got an email from NTA saying that the exams had been postponed. There was an issue with the CUET process overall. The NTA was adrift in its operations. Exam postponements, exam centre changes (often as little as an hour before the exam), exam software bugs, and a great deal of worry for the students. I finally appeared for my first exam 2 weeks after the postponement incident. I had three exams on that day. The exam was completed significantly faster than expected, and the questions were shockingly simple. My other exam, which was rescheduled, went fairly well as well.
The end of exams didn’t feel good because there was nothing I could do but wait for the results to come out. The announcement of results and the commencement of college had no set date. Finally, the day came after almost a month’s wait. I scored 783/800 with a 100 percentile in 3 subjects. Once more, nothing was guaranteed, so I had no idea if these grades would get me into Stephen's. A few days later, I found out my rank, and based on the number of seats available, I had made it into St. Stephen's. For the first time, everything seemed worthwhile. Everything made sense, even the long hours of preparing, the unpredictability of the test, and having taken three major examinations in less than a year. My admission to St. Stephen’s was officially confirmed a month later.
