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Hard work, focus, consistency: Students who ace India’s tech college entrance exams without coaching

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Students at Allen Career Institute, the biggest coaching firm in Kota, India.

Students at Allen Career Institute, the biggest coaching firm in Kota, India.

ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTA

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- Coaching may seem indispensable to crack India’s intensely competitive medical and technical college entrance exams, but there are many who make the cut without it.

In fact, data from 2016-18 from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) show that the majority of students secured a seat by studying on their own. In 2018, the last year for which such data is available, 59 per cent of the 11,961 students admitted into IITs claimed they made it through “self-study”. 

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