Apparently my source isn't as reliable as I had thought he was: FIITJEE is off on Sundays. When he said that I had "left FIITJEE in the nick of time", I naturally assumed that the sentence "We have [classes] every day until 3" was to be interpreted in an equally dramatic fashion. This is rather anticlimactic. The eleventh graders had classes till three even last year. I reveled in the fact that we got to leave a whole two hours before they did. That's because the System had already developed the Boxer Complex.
I say "anticlimactic", but not "embarrassing". Admittedly, the discovery that I was wrong about Sunday classes does make my previous entry sound ridiculous - to someone who doesn't know how an organization like FIITJEE functions. When the All India Test Series (AITS - a disease worse than AIDS. The virus does all it can to impede logical thinking, and functions metaphysically in much the same way as O'Brien from Orwell's 1984. If it weren't for Orwell's books, we would still be left only with nameless abstractions.) starts in October, students will be doomed to spend every second Sunday in taking eight-hour-long IIT-style tests (ten hours or more, if you factor in the travel and rest time) which are designed to be unsolvable. And that's something the System itself says. Apparently if, by taking twenty (Thirty? I forget the number.) of these impossibly hard tests, you are demoralized to the point that you become a Kantian, you will be in a great position to take the JEE. When you open the JEE test booklet, you will be so surprised at the easiness of the questions that ten times the knowledge you thought you possessed will come rushing out of the hinterland of your mind, where it was consigned by the AITS, and guarantee you success. (At this point, you could probably imagine an Apu Nahasapeemapetilon nodding his head from side to side, and saying "100%, 100%!")
This apparently foolproof scheme will occasion you more stress from September to March than, say, what Neil Armstrong would have felt if he had discovered that his oxygen supply had been cut off shortly after he had taken mankind's giant leap. People who claim they study well "under pressure" don't understand what studying means. Anyone who has done anything in life will know that stress impedes progress. FIITJEE students are no exception. The course doesn't get over till January, so studying for the AITS would mean not giving enough attention to the later topics - which, by no coincidence, are some of the most important and most difficult.
Do people choose not to take the AITS? Yes. Yes, they do. In fact, more than half the school stops showing up after the first two tests. But the beauty (in a manner of speaking) of this scheme is that you will end up feeling demoralized regardless. Even if you attempt to shut reality out, your peers will always talk about the tests, and your teachers will always attempt to discuss test questions in class. Not having seen those questions before, you will begin to seriously doubt your abilities. Many even take the next AITS; but in addition to being further demoralized (contrary to what they would have expected), they are now filled with a sharp sense of having wasted precious time, which becomes more pronounced during the study break.
Am I being a bit too cynical about the AITS? Yes. Yes, I am. The questions in the AITS are good questions. Hard questions, questions that you might not be able to solve even in your second or third attempt, but good nonetheless. All knowledge is useful, in some way or other. However, in the context of the severely delimited JEE course, the AITS is quite simply a burden - especially since IITJEE students don't have the time to put themselves through dubious psychological experiments that claim to boost their self-confidence.
Did I mention that teachers tend to take extra classes on non-AITS Sundays?
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