How to choose JEE or NEET coaching after Class 10

Between the Class 10 board exam and the start of Class 11, most families in Nashik and the district towns visit two to four coaching institutes, and by the third visit the presentations start to sound alike. Everyone talks about experienced faculty, proven results, small batches and individual attention.

What helps is asking questions whose answer has to be a number, a name or a place. These are the nine we would ask if it were our own child. Ask them at every institute, including ours.

1. Where will my child be from 7 am to 9 pm?

Ask for the full daily timetable, including the hours outside coaching. A common arrangement is a junior college in the morning and a coaching class in the evening, in two different parts of the city. Once you add travel, a Class 11 student can easily lose one to two hours a day on the road, and self-study gets pushed late into the night.

Some families consider a "dummy school", where the child is enrolled only on paper. Boards are strict about attendance, and the child misses out on normal school life as well. If you are considering it, ask the institute directly what happens if the board enforces its attendance rules.

Look for an arrangement where college, coaching and supervised self-study all run in one place, on one timetable.

2. How many students will be in my child's room?

"Small batches" means different things at different institutes, so ask for the number. Then ask whether it will stay the same after admissions close. In some institutes batches grow sharply by August, when late admissions are merged in.

A teacher with 40 students can know every child's name, test marks and weak chapters, which even a brilliant teacher cannot manage in a room of 150.

3. Who exactly will teach, and for how long?

Ask for the name of the teacher for each subject, and whether the same people will teach in Class 12. Teacher turnover is one of the most common problems students describe. With a new teacher every few months, some topics get repeated, others get skipped, and the student has to get used to a new style each time.

If you can, ask to sit in on a regular lecture for 20 minutes. You will learn more from that than from the brochure.

4. When and how are doubts solved?

In our experience, how doubts are handled affects a JEE or NEET result more than the lectures do. Ask how many hours a day a teacher is available for doubts, whether those hours are part of the timetable, and whether the subject teacher solves them or a junior assistant does. When an institute says "the student can ask after class", it usually means a queue of 30 students and a teacher with a bus to catch.

5. How often are tests held, and what do parents see?

Look for regular chapter tests as well as full-length mocks on the real exam pattern, with an analysis for each student showing the weak chapters, the kind of mistakes made and what to do next. Ask to see a sample report with the name hidden, and ask how often parents get one.

6. What is the phone policy?

Institutes differ sharply on this. If study material, homework or doubt-solving runs through a phone app, the phone will be in your child's hand for hours every day, and not all of those hours will go to study. Ask whether material is given in print and whether phones are allowed on campus at all.

7. How should you read the results?

Read results pages carefully. When an institute shows you its toppers, ask:

• Which year, and which exam? A 99 percentile in JEE Main and a JEE Advanced rank are different achievements.
• Did the student study there for the full two years, or join a short test series?
• Out of how many students in that batch?

A short list with full names, years and colleges tells you more than a line saying "500+ selections".

8. For hostel students: who is responsible at night?

If your child will live away from home, try to visit the hostel in the evening rather than at noon. Ask who the warden is, whether boys and girls stay separately, how students contact parents, what the evening study routine is, who takes a sick student to the doctor, and what the rules are for going out.

9. What happens if my child falls behind?

Every student has a bad month, whether it is an illness, a chapter that does not click or a test that goes badly. Ask what the institute does then. Some offer extra doubt time, a revision class or a mentor who notices the slip; in others the student is expected to catch up alone while the batch moves on.

A table to fill in on your visits

Print this page and take it with you on visits.

How we answer these questions

Our own answers are 40 students per batch, the same IITian, NITian and doctor teachers for both years, an 11-hour day on the Ashoka campus with about five hours of supervised self-study and doubt solving, printed material, no phones, and a 300-seat hostel with wardens and separate arrangements for girls. The details are on the comparison page and the daily routine page, but please ask us the same questions in person when you visit.

Questions parents ask us