Introducing PrepDNA: Hacking your selection in NEET PG
How can you hack your way to success in NEET PG? Do we have some secret magic formula? Or do we have some secret contact in NBE? We have neither. But we are still confident that we can help you hack your way to success in NEET PG.
Let me give you a bit of history to explain why we can do it.
The Making of PrepDNA
We started MCQdb (parent company of Pre-PG) with the goal of helping students to succeed in exams and get to their dreams. We had a slow start but grew fast over the last year almost completely driven by word-of-mouth recommendations. Throughout this time, we have been analyzing every student’s performance.
By this January, when we crossed 150,000 users, we had analyzed data from over 60,000 Pre-PG doctors who had appeared in NEET PG.
This data was a goldmine for us to start correlating the progress of our users and their marks and ranks in NEET PG. It included over 70% of the students who got in top 5000 (over 3500 students in top 5000 had used Pre-PG).
To understand and analyze every Pre-PG student we had to split the huge NEET PG syllabus into 2,800+ concepts. Tens of thousands of our users contributed to this effort! We organized questions by many more aspects, e.g., one-liners, case-based, thought-based, confusing questions, difficult questions, obscure questions, difficulty levels, etc.
With the content organized, we started slicing and dicing over 115+ million attempts data in many different ways and tracking the progress of all our students to understand what made them successful.
Finally, after three months of hard work by our data scientists and developers, we got the ingredients of what correlates with success (or failure), all the way from Shiralee Runwal, Madhan Ram to our users who got 50,000+ ranks.
The results were mind-boggling, so much so that even we did not initially believe them. In this blog, we are only going to talk about one aspect of our research and findings and hold off on some of our surprising findings.
What is PrepDNA?
PrepDNA is your unique level of preparation, which acts as a guide to your goal, and which areas you need to focus on to get there. Just like your DNA, PrepDNA has all the information of your level of preparation and no two doctors will have the same PrepDNA. PrepDNA will also tell you how to mutate it by focusing on the right concepts to master.
To build you PrepDNA, we analyzed the daily test performance of each of our users and evaluated their weaknesses and strengths relative to other users getting selected in top 100 (or users who consistently appeared in top 30 in PrePG prep daily rankings).
PrepDNA is a map of your preparation. It gives you view into your weaknesses and strengths in a single graph. You can drill down to see topic level (and later concept level) weakness and strengths. We are also publishing PrepDNAs of few of our students at different ranks so that you can use them to judge where you stand when comparing to these students and how much work is needed to get there.
Even though I’ve mentioned the ranks, you could have easily figure it out if I’d jumbled these PrepDNA up.
What does PrepDNA show?
PrepDNA is a weighted color-coded grouping of concepts or topics that signify importance (by size) and proficiency (by color)
For example, in the graph shown above, you can see that Medicine has the highest importance. Similarly, the height of a colored cell tells how many concepts are a part of that proficiency level.
We’ve weighted the colors to identify success clearly, and only 90+ proficiency is green (varying shades). Red signals you need to work on those subjects/topics till they become at least yellow.
You can also dive deeper into subject level PrepDNA, where you will see the topic wise preparedness and color coding representing concepts in that topic.
How does this work?
As our students practice or take daily tests, we analyze each of their attempts on parameters like the concept, question difficulty, guess likelihood, user confidence, and more, to give the student a proficiency gain number.
As the user practices more, we start getting more of this information for every concept that we have. This information then helps us create the PrepDNA.
The gray color denotes that we do not have enough data for those concepts to find out PrepDNA for those concepts/topics.
Using PrepDNA
The sole purpose of PrepDNA is to help you prepare in a focused manner with a constant feedback loop. You should work on the weakest areas first, and your goal is not to have an area that is so weak that it may cost you your rank.
PrepDNA is your weakness and strength analysis on steroids. Until now, doctors relied on our Daily subject tests, or Grand tests to identify their weakness as compared to others preparing for NEET.
We’ve taken this guesswork out and given you exactly what you are strong in or weak in relative to at least 60,000 other doctors
As a student, your goal would be to make a weekly plan on which weak areas you will focus on and make them one of the stronger areas. Work on the plan on at the topic level. Practice questions on the topic, read notes and practice more until you reach the next level in the topic. Then move to next topic. DO NOT move to next topic until the first topic has not reached a satisfactory level. If you can manage 2–4 topics every day, you will be done with full syllabus in 3–4 months (which is perfect for NEET 2019).
If you stick to this plan, your preparation will get on overdrive. And you will start investing time in subjects and topics where you will get the best return on your time investment.
PrepDNA benefits
- PrepDNA fits into your study plan. You can still study in the sequence of subjects or systems you have chosen. PrepDNA will provide you regular feedback on progress and direction
- PrepDNA will accurately identify your weaknesses. You might think you know your strengths and weaknesses, but you will be proven wrong in many cases when you see the data for the first time. Remember, in a competitive test, you need to know your relative weaknesses, and that’s what PrepDNA helps you identify by comparing your performance against 60,000+ doctors
- PrepDNA lets you act right away. You can drill down to any topic (and soon, on any concept) that you need to focus on and start practicing your weakest questions right away
- PrepDNA takes the element of luck out of the evaluation. We have designed PrepDNA to be an accurate representation of your preparation. You may do well in a few mock tests, but if you PrepDNA is not painting a pretty picture, it is unlikely you will consistently do well.
More on PrepDNA
While subject-level PrepDNA is available for all users, only Pre-PG Premium members get access to topic-level PrepDNA. Learn about this as well as other benefits that you get with Pre-PG Premium:
Want to learn about how to use Pre-PG most effectively? Read this post:
