Topper Story: 118/120 in JEE Main Physics 2025

Siddharth Mishra from Bhopal scored 118 out of 120 in JEE Main Physics in the April 2025 session, achieving a 99.8 percentile in the subject. What makes his story particularly instructive is that he did not crack Physics until four months before the exam. This is his account of what changed and exactly how he went from a 72 in his January mock to 118 in the actual exam.

The Turning Point

"I had been treating Physics like a formula-memorisation exercise for the first year of preparation," Siddharth says. "Every mock test, I would blank out on problems I had 'seen before' because I had never understood the underlying concept — I had just memorised the answer. In December 2024, my tutor told me something that changed everything: 'You are solving problems to feel busy. You need to solve them to understand.'"

He immediately stopped touching new problems for two weeks and went back to basics — specifically, to reading NCERT Physics Part 1 and Part 2 as if for the first time, but this time writing down the core idea of each paragraph in his own words. "This was the most boring two weeks of my preparation. I wanted to solve problems. But by the end, I genuinely understood why electric field lines cannot cross, and why the Carnot engine is the most efficient possible. Everything after that was faster."

The Chapter Prioritisation

After his conceptual foundation work, Siddharth mapped out the JEE Main Physics paper by marks-per-hour: "I looked at the previous five years' question papers and ranked every chapter by how many marks it gave relative to how long it took to master. Electrodynamics was rank 1 — huge marks, teachable, with predictable question types. Modern Physics was rank 2 — high marks, low calculation, almost entirely concept-based. Mechanics was rank 3 — high marks but wide and calculation-heavy." He spent six weeks on Electrodynamics, three weeks on Modern Physics, and four weeks on Mechanics. Take a free mock test to see how your current chapter-wise performance compares to Siddharth's target distribution.

The Problem-Solving Method

"For every problem I solved, I wrote three things: the concept it tested, the mistake I initially made, and the 10-second 'insight' that solves the problem quickly. By exam day, I had a notebook with 400+ such insights. Reading through that notebook in the final week was more useful than solving 200 new problems." This approach — building a personal insight library rather than an accumulation of solved problems — is something every Physics teacher recommends but few students actually implement.

Siddharth used DC Pandey for Electrodynamics and HC Verma for Mechanics. "HC Verma's exercises are conceptually designed — they catch gaps that DC Pandey's more formula-heavy problems miss. For final-level practice, I used previous year JEE Main and Advanced papers." For the chapter-by-chapter approach he used, see our Physics Important Topics Guide.

Mock Test Strategy

"I took a full mock every Sunday from January to April. But the mock itself was only 30% of the value — the analysis was 70%. I would spend four hours after every mock doing three things: identifying which errors were conceptual (I didn't know the concept), which were procedural (I knew it but applied wrong), and which were careless (I knew the answer but made an arithmetic error). Then I would fix each type differently." Conceptual errors sent him back to NCERT. Procedural errors meant re-doing that question type five times. Careless errors required slowing down by 10 seconds per question.

The Final 15 Days

"I did nothing new in the final 15 days. I read my insight notebook twice. I solved one previous year paper every day. I slept 8 hours every night. On exam day, the questions felt familiar — not because I had 'seen them before' but because I genuinely understood the concepts behind them. Two questions I had never seen the exact form of, but I derived the answer from first principles in 90 seconds each."

For a structured version of Siddharth's approach, follow our 30-Day Physics Revision Plan and our Physics Score 100+ Strategy. Upgrade for ₹149/month for the chapter-wise mock tests and analytics that Siddharth used in his preparation.