Stop Reading. Start Scoring.
Sections 1 to 13 taught the chapter. This section finds out whether you can use it with a clock running.
What follows is a single test paper. The thirty questions are spread across the whole of thermodynamics — the first law and its signs, work in each kind of process, against , calorimetry, Hess's law and formation enthalpies, bond and Born-Haber enthalpies, entropy, Gibbs energy and the crossover temperature, and the link between and . They are ordered the way a real paper orders them, which is to say barely at all: a one-line substitution can sit next to a three-step cycle.
Key Point: Sit with a blank sheet, a pen and a timer, and attempt all 30 questions in one unbroken sitting before you read a single explanation. Checking answers as you go turns the paper into a reading exercise, and a reading exercise tells you nothing about what you can produce in the hall.
| The setup | What it is |
|---|---|
| Number of questions | 30, every one single-correct with four options |
| Marking scheme | for a correct answer, for an incorrect answer, for one left unattempted |
| Maximum score | |
| Minimum possible score | , which is what you get if all thirty are attempted and all thirty are wrong |
| Suggested time limit | 35 minutes, or about 70 seconds a question |
| Allowed | a rough sheet, and , and the conversion |
| Not allowed | a calculator, a formula sheet, and looking back at any earlier section |
The negative mark is the part most students underrate. A wrong answer and a correct one are five marks apart, so a question you are genuinely blank on is worth leaving blank. A question where you have knocked out two options is worth attempting.
[JEE Main] Do not solve in paper order. Take the substitutions first, bank them, and come back to the cycles and the sign-heavy statement questions with whatever minutes are left.
How to mark yourself
Award , and exactly as the scheme says — no part marks for "I knew that one really" — and total it.
| Score out of 120 | What it means | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| 96 and above | The chapter is exam-ready. Your errors are slips, not gaps. | Move to timed mixed papers; keep only the two or three formulae you fumbled on a card. |
| 72 to 95 | The theory is solid, the speed or the arithmetic is not. | Redo the ones you got wrong against a clock. Most of your loss is sign errors and . |
| 48 to 71 | One or two whole topics are soft while the rest holds. | Find the two tags that swallowed the most marks and reread only those sections, then retake this paper. |
| 24 to 47 | The formulae are half-remembered, so every numerical becomes a guess. | Go back to sections 2 to 5 and 9 to 11 and rebuild them; a formula you cannot write in five seconds is not learnt. |
| Below 24 | The chapter has not been studied, only read. | Restart at section 1 and work the solved examples in section 12 with a pen before returning here. |
Now do the part that actually raises the score. For every question you got wrong, write the tag next to it, open the section that tag points at, and find the exact line you contradicted. A wrong answer that you cannot trace back to a specific sentence will be got wrong again in three weeks.
One extra column in your review: mark the questions you guessed right. They are wrong answers that happened to land, and they belong in the revision pile with the rest.