Students taking an exam
Well, solving the past years’ exams is well known strategy that students use right from Class 1. The question is whether this will work for JEE since it is a different type of exam, as mentioned in many of my posts. Therefore, let us consider two scenarios. The first is that of a diligent student and the other case of a not-so-diligent one.
In the first case, for school/Board exams, usually the student finishes the syllabus first and then attempts the past years’ questions. For the second case, let us consider an extreme scenario of the student only doing the past years’ questions without really studying the material in the syllabus.
The reason this works is as follows. In the school and Board exams, the questions are asked from a known pool. Therefore, if you do the past years’ questions, you cover most of the questions that are likely to be asked. But, that is not the case in JEE where the questions are brand new. Therefore, solving the past years’ questions helps more with the Boards.
That does not mean that solving the past years’ question papers is completely useless for the JEE. After all, the aim of every aspirant in JEE prep is to imbibe the concepts so that he may able to tackle the questions that are asked in the JEE. So, solving the past question papers will help to the extent it helps the aspirant imbibe the concepts. After all, it does not matter how the aspirant manages to do this so long as he gets the desired result.
However, as mentioned in Board vs JEE Preps, sometimes an aspirant tends to cram the solution(s) because that is what has produced the results in school/Board exams. In such cases, doing the past questions could prove to be counter productive since the aspirant would feel that he can solve the past questions; as a result, he would develop a false sense of confidence and believe he is ready for the exam. But, as mentioned above, the questions in the JEE are brand new and he could be in for a rude shock!
In these cases, as is obvious, an aspirant needs to unlearn his studying methods and learn new skills; this needs to be done as efficiently as possible. This, however, is beyond the domain of a tutor who deals more with concepts and not learning methods, prep strategy, exam strategy, etc. And, that is one of the reasons why an aspirant would need a mentor; please see Is a Mentor necessary in JEE prep? for more on this. However, please remember that it would be too late to learn new studying methods and skills during revision; ideally, this should commence at the beginning of prep.
Next, the key to doing well in the JEE is to raise your skills to the appropriate levels, as explained in Board vs JEE Preps and Nature, Nurture or Both?. As a result, the materials of most established coaching classes are designed in such a way that they gently lead you deeper and deeper into the relevant topics. This helps a student to develop the skills needed to tackle the JEE questions. In other words, the coaching class material teaches you to analyze a problem, break it up into its sub parts to simplify the problem and, finally, tackle them to produce the solution.
Also, frequently, the coaching material has questions that are extrapolations/twists of past JEE questions. Therefore, it certainly helps to solve the questions in the coaching material. However, more often than not, JEE aspirants need more practice than that provided by the coaching material. In that case, an aspirant has to use additional resources. Here, the aspirant has to begin with a resource at par with his skill levels and then go on to higher levels. The sequence of resources/books is suggested in Books for JEE prep
In short, if you’ve prepared well, you don’t really need to do the past questions. If not, e.g., the second scenario above, doing the past questions would help to some extent when you are just a few weeks away from the exam.
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