Topper Story: Shreya Misra's 99 in JEE Chemistry

Shreya Misra, a 2025 aspirant from Lucknow, scored a near-perfect 99 in JEE Main Chemistry. Chemistry is often seen as the easiest of the three subjects, yet most students hover around seventy because they treat it casually. Shreya's story shows what disciplined, NCERT-anchored preparation can achieve. We break down the exact system that took her to the top of the section.

NCERT as the Single Source of Truth

Shreya's central principle was that NCERT is non-negotiable for chemistry, especially inorganic. "Every line in NCERT inorganic is a potential question," she says. She read the NCERT chemistry textbooks three times cover to cover, highlighting different things on each pass: facts the first time, exceptions the second, and reaction conditions the third. This layered reading meant nothing slipped through. She credits this discipline for her flawless inorganic performance, built on the approach in our NCERT chemistry strategy guide.

She supplemented NCERT only where it was thin, using a standard reference for physical chemistry numericals and organic mechanisms, but never let secondary books displace the core text.

Daily Reaction Practice

For organic chemistry, Shreya wrote out reactions by hand every single day. "Organic is a language, and you only become fluent by using it daily," she explains. She maintained a reaction notebook organised by functional group, adding mechanisms and named reactions as she encountered them. Her favourite tool was working through reaction sequences, predicting each product before checking, using guides like our organic reactions guide and named reactions guide to fill gaps.

Conquering Physical Chemistry Numericals

Physical chemistry was Shreya's initial weakness, since it demanded the calculation discipline of physics. She tackled it by maintaining a formula sheet and solving timed problem sets every other day, focusing on equilibrium, kinetics, and electrochemistry. "I treated physical chemistry like maths — formula, substitute, compute, check," she says. She regularly took diagnostic tests, encouraging other students to take a free mock test to identify which physical chemistry topics needed the most work. Within two months her accuracy in numericals matched her recall-based inorganic scores.

The Revision System and Her Advice

In the final stretch Shreya revised her three notebooks — inorganic facts, organic reactions, and physical chemistry formulas — on a rotating daily schedule, ensuring each was reviewed every third day. She sat full mocks weekly and analysed her chemistry section in detail, noting that her remaining errors were almost entirely careless misreadings rather than knowledge gaps. On exam day she attempted chemistry first to bank quick, confident marks and build momentum for the harder sections.

Her advice is simple but demanding: "Read NCERT until you have memorised it, write organic reactions every day, and treat physical chemistry like maths." Students who want to follow her structured path can begin with our 30-day chemistry plan and build the same three-notebook discipline that took Shreya to 99.

Her Approach to Tricky Inorganic Exceptions

Inorganic chemistry is riddled with exceptions, and Shreya developed a specific method for them. Rather than trying to memorise each anomaly in isolation, she grouped related exceptions and looked for the underlying reason, such as the stability of half-filled and fully-filled subshells explaining several configuration and ionisation-energy anomalies. Understanding the cause meant she could reconstruct the exception even if she forgot the specific fact, which proved decisive on unfamiliar questions.

She maintained a dedicated exceptions page in her inorganic notebook, revised it more frequently than the rest, and tested herself on it weekly. This concentrated attention on the highest-difficulty material ensured that the questions designed to separate top scorers from the rest became her strength rather than her weakness. Her advice is to give exceptions disproportionate revision time, since they carry disproportionate discriminating power in the exam.