Chennai-based Mahalaxmi Swaminathan is one of 108 CUET UG 2022 toppers who secured 755/800 marks in the exam. She is currently pursuing BA (Hons) in Economics from Sri Ram College of Commerce.
Speaking to indianexpress.com, Swaminathan shares how she prepared for the CUET.
My journey was fairly easy as we had two board exams and the first board exam was completely MCQ-based. This format helped in preparing for the CUET. Our school teachers helped us understand how to answer objective questions.
I relied on the same preparation material that I used for CBSE board exams. I prepared from Arihant, and Oswaal's books and there were YouTube videos and many ebooks available on Telegram. And also, the CUET UG 2022 was completely based on NCERT so, a thorough reading of NCERT was important.
My IPMAT preparation helped me
Before CUET, I was preparing for IPMAT and the revision helped me so much that I was able to understand how to answer questions based on literature subjects such as English. I referred to books like ‘Word Power Made Easy’ and ‘Wren and Martin’ for my grammar as well as newspapers.
In my term-end exam, English was the only subject which was hard, so that helped me channelize my preparation in a manner that I was able to answer objective questions. Also, I felt the CUET English paper was easy.
When the NTA released the answer key, as per my calculations, I should have scored 180 out of 200. However, I was upset to check the final results where I got only 150 marks because of normalization and it impacted my overall result. And, scoring less in Maths could have affected my marks as this is a compulsory subject for any course in SRCC. I was skeptical as I felt 755 was a really low score for SRCC, however, I got through this.
Opportunities increased due to CUET
I feel the opportunities for people have increased due to CUET, however, it also depends on what people are aiming for, because Delhi University was very clear that they would consider only those subjects that students studied in their Class 11 and 12. It also depends on universities a lot.
Initially, I felt CUET was exhausting as our batch had to give two board exams. I was lucky to be in the first phase of CUET but people who appeared in the second phase of the exam faced a lot of issues, there were technical glitches and the CUET itself dragged on till September.
I would suggest the normalization procedure should be made more understandable to students. It is pretty confusing. I remember being unsure till the end of how my score fell from 180 to 150.
CUET is easier than board exams
The CBSE board exams were tougher than CUET. Board exams had more application-based questions while CUET had more direct questions. Even the English had many subjective questions, but I felt the CUET English paper was elementary.
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