With 15 days left before INI-CET — 200 MCQs, 180 minutes, 4 blocks of 50, +1/−1/3 marking, conducted by AIIMS New Delhi — execute this three-phase plan:
Days 15–9: High-yield sweep + recent advances + image revision. Rotate through your highest-yield subjects in paired blocks: one block for depth and recent advances, one for applied MCQs and images. No new content — deepen and sharpen what you already know.
Days 8–3: Full-length timed block mocks + mistake analysis. One 200-question, 180-minute INI-CET-pattern mock every alternate day. After each paper, audit losses into three buckets — knowledge gaps, pacing errors, negative-marking miscalibration — and feed them back into your next revision session.
Days 2–1: Taper, not sprint. A light recall pass over your personal mistake log and key values, exam logistics sorted, and at least seven to eight hours of sleep each night. Consolidation and rest earn more marks at this stage than new reading does.
This plan works because INI-CET is a ranked exam that rewards execution precision on exam day — and the final 15 days are where preparation converts into rank.
Why the last 15 days are a different kind of work
Every hour you study from this point has a different return profile than the hours that came before. Six months ago, covering a new subject was the highest-leverage action. Today, a new chapter competes with your well-practised older material for retrieval slots and typically underperforms it on exam day. The last 15 days are not an extension of your learning phase — they are a performance phase, and the goal is to peak on the day that counts.
INI-CET is also a distinctly unforgiving exam for an unprepared final fortnight. At 54 seconds per question across four sequential, no-back-navigation blocks, there is no room for retrieval hesitation built from rushed new content. The paper is more applied and image-heavy than NEET PG, recent advances appear in clinical vignette formats rather than as isolated fact questions, and the −1/3 penalty is real enough to punish reckless guessing. Three skills determine a top rank in these final days: high-yield recall sharpness, image pattern fluency, and per-block pacing discipline under the real marking scheme.
The structure below gives you all three. It is demanding but humane — it assumes you are a serious candidate who has done the foundational work and now needs a disciplined, sequenced plan to convert depth into rank. For the full strategic context on what INI-CET rewards across a longer preparation window, see the complete INI-CET preparation guide or the INI-CET strategy and study plan before diving into the 15-day clock.
Phase 1 — Days 15 to 9: High-yield sweep, recent advances, and image revision
The goal of this phase is sharp, fast retrieval across your high-yield core — not new coverage.
Structure each study day in two paired blocks. The first block is your depth and recent-advances reading block. The second block is your applied MCQ and image practice block. Running them in this order — read then apply — forces consolidation within the same session and surfaces gaps while they are still correctable.
Daily block structure (Days 15–9):
Block
Duration
Focus
Depth + recent advances
90–120 min
High-yield revision + advances notes for the day's subject
Applied MCQs + image review
90–120 min
Applied/vignette MCQs on the same subject + 30–45 min images
Mistake review
30 min
Flag every wrong answer; note the gap type (knowledge / reasoning / image)
Rest and wind-down
Protected
Non-negotiable — consolidation happens off the page
Subject rotation for Days 15–9:
Rotate through your highest-yield subjects in this order, weighted by how heavily INI-CET draws on them and how applied the questions get:
Day 15 — Medicine. Cardiovascular, respiratory, nephrology, and endocrine applied management. Pair with recent advances: new heart failure guidelines, drug approvals, updated staging criteria.
Day 14 — Surgery + Radiology. Named signs, tumour staging, emergency algorithms. Pair with radiograph and CT image pattern drilling — Surgery and Radiology together because imaging is integral to the Surgery vignettes on INI-CET.
Day 13 — Pathology + Microbiology. Mechanism-based pathology and applied micro. Pair with pathology slide images: histology, gross specimens, and micro stains at pattern-recognition speed.
Day 12 — OBG + Pediatrics. Obstetric emergencies, recent advances in perinatal protocols, Peds immunisation and growth milestones. Pair with assertion-reason and next-best-step questions — both subjects generate these at high frequency on INI-CET.
Day 11 — Pharmacology + PSM. New drug classes, recently approved molecules, updated drug-of-choice lists. PSM statistics, epidemiology values, and national health programme updates. Pair with integrated reasoning MCQs.
Day 10 — Anatomy + Physiology + Biochemistry. Revise through a clinical-application and image lens: radiological anatomy, instrument images, and applied physiology graphs. Keep this light on new content and heavy on applied pattern recall.
Day 9 — Mixed high-yield + full image revision. Use your wrong-answer log from Days 15–10 to choose subjects. Spend the afternoon in a dedicated, timed image session across all modalities — ECGs, fundoscopy, clinical photographs, and chest X-rays — working from your collected image set.
Recent advances: how to handle them in the final fortnight
Recent advances are where INI-CET separates from every other Indian PG exam — AIIMS examiners favour new guidelines, recently approved drugs, updated staging and classification systems, and protocol revisions in clinically applied formats. A candidate who knows the classic presentation but not the current management guideline loses a question that a well-prepared rival answers confidently.
In the last 15 days, do not attempt to generate a new advances list from scratch. Instead, use what you have already curated and practise it actively. The most effective recent-advances revision method at this stage is MCQ-based recall, not passive re-reading. Take each advance — a drug approval, a guideline update, a revised classification — and convert it into a practice question: "In which condition is X now first-line?", "What does the 2025 guideline recommend for Y?". Working through advances as applied questions rather than as a list to memorise gives you two things: retrieval practice in the format you will see on exam day, and a faster signal on which advances have genuinely stuck versus which need one more rep.
In the subject rotation above, the recent-advances block is 30–45 minutes of each 90-minute depth block. Spend it on advances directly tied to that day's subject rather than sampling across subjects — depth-per-day is more useful than breadth-per-day in a revision phase. If you have not yet built a curated advances file, a focused 2-hour sweep of the most frequently tested recent topics — new drug classes, major guideline revisions, scoring system updates — is a worthwhile Day 15 investment before entering the daily rotation.
Image revision: the 15–25% of the paper that rewards daily drilling
Roughly 15–25% of INI-CET is image-based, which means between 30 and 50 of the 200 questions on your paper hinge on reading a radiograph, CT/MRI, pathology slide, ECG, fundoscopy image, or clinical photograph. At 54 seconds per question, recognition fluency — not slow analytical reasoning — is what converts image questions into marks. The candidates who score well on the image block have practised pattern recognition until the classic findings are immediate.
In your final 15 days, protect a 30–45 minute daily image block. Do not embed it in passive reading — run it as active testing. Work through your image collection one by one: cover the label, name the modality, describe the single most prominent finding, then reach the diagnosis before revealing the answer. This three-step sequence — modality, finding, diagnosis — is the same one you will execute on exam day under time pressure, and rehearsing it makes the pathway automatic.
Subject-specific image priorities for the final fortnight:
If your image collection is thin, the applied MCQ bank on NEETPGAI covers image-based questions with visual explanations — a useful supplement when your own collection has gaps.
Phase 2 — Days 8 to 3: Full-length timed mocks and mistake analysis
The goal of this phase is to convert depth into rank under the real exam structure.
This is where strategy stops being theoretical. Starting Day 8, alternate between full-length timed mock days and revision days keyed to whatever the previous mock exposed. Do not take mocks on consecutive days — the post-mock audit and targeted revision are as valuable as the paper itself, and you need the in-between day to implement the lessons before the next test.
Mock day structure:
Run each paper under exact INI-CET conditions without exception:
200 questions, 180 minutes, 4 blocks of 50 with no backward navigation between blocks
Apply −1/3 marking honestly to your score — do not score wrong answers as zero
Sit the full paper in one stretch without breaks between blocks; stamina matters
Post-mock audit — the 3-bucket system:
After every paper, separate your losses into three distinct buckets before you do anything else:
Bucket
Diagnosis
Fix
Knowledge gaps
Topic you genuinely did not know
Feed back into the next revision block; add to your mistake log
Pacing errors
Questions you ran out of time for or rushed incorrectly
Adjust your per-block target; practise flagging-and-returning within blocks
Negative-marking miscalibration
Wrong guesses you should have blanked, or blanks you should have attempted
Recalibrate your elimination threshold for the next paper
The third bucket is the one most candidates ignore and the one that most predictably leaks rank. With −1/3 marking, a wrong answer costs you one mark relative to a blank. The disciplined rule is: attempt when you can eliminate at least one or two options cleanly; leave blank on a pure four-way guess. Use your mock data to measure your actual accuracy below different confidence levels — if your accuracy when uncertain is below 50%, your threshold is too low and you are losing net marks. Finding this calibration in the mock phase, not on exam day, is the point of the exercise.
Revision day structure (between mocks):
On revision days, work exclusively from your accumulated mistake log. Do not read new chapters. Spend the first two hours on the knowledge-gap topics flagged in the previous mock's audit, one hour on re-drilling the specific images you missed, and one hour on a targeted MCQ set in the subjects where your accuracy data shows the steepest drop. By Day 3, your revision days should feel shorter and the gaps smaller — that narrowing is the sign the plan is working.
The four-block, no-backtrack structure of INI-CET punishes poor pacing in a way that free-navigation exams do not. When the block closes — at the 45-minute mark for a well-paced candidate — it closes permanently. Any question you left unanswered hoping to return is a guaranteed zero, not a deferred attempt.
Inside each block, run a two-pass strategy. First pass: answer every question you know confidently without hesitation, flag the genuinely uncertain ones, and skip the ones that look very hard. Second pass: return to your flagged questions, apply your elimination guessing rule, and attempt or blank each one before the block ends. Never start the second pass on a question you have no information on — prioritise the flagged questions where you have partial elimination, because those are the positive-expected-value attempts.
The pacing target is approximately 45 minutes per block, which averages to 54 seconds per question — but that average conceals the real strategy. Questions you know well should take 20–30 seconds. The time you save on easy questions buys you 90–120 seconds on each hard flagged question in the second pass. Practising this two-pass rhythm in every mock is the only way to make it automatic on exam day.
Phase 3 — Days 2 and 1: Taper, consolidate, and rest
The goal of this phase is to arrive at the exam centre at your peak — not to squeeze in one more chapter.
Day 2 is a light, structured recall day. Spend two to three hours on the following, in this order: your personal mistake log (the repeated wrong answers across all your mocks), key normal values and reference ranges you have found hard to retain, classification tables and staging criteria that appear in INI-CET, and a quick pass over your recent-advances flashcards. Nothing new. Nothing unfamiliar. Everything you touch on Day 2 should already be in your memory — you are refreshing retrieval pathways, not building new ones.
Day 2 afternoon and evening is for logistics, not revision. Confirm your admit card is printed and accessible. Confirm your approved ID proof. Plan your route to the exam centre and know the travel time, including a buffer for delays. Know what you can and cannot bring into the hall. Laying this out the afternoon before means your exam day morning is calm rather than scrambling — a small thing that costs half an hour and protects an hour of mental bandwidth on exam morning.
Day 1 is light to the point of minimal. An hour of the gentlest recall — high-confidence items only, nothing that creates doubt — then stop. Eat normally, avoid a heavy meal the night before, and prioritise sleep above everything else. Seven to eight hours of consolidated sleep is worth more to your retrieval speed and pacing precision than any amount of last-minute reading. Candidates who sacrifice sleep to read on the final night arrive at the exam with degraded working memory and slower reaction times under the four-block clock.
The taper is not passive — it is deliberate consolidation. Trust the preparation. The final 48 hours are where a strong candidate converts good preparation into a peak performance, or where a nervous one bleeds it through exhaustion and anxiety.
Managing anxiety and burnout in the final stretch
Anxiety in the last 15 days is a sign that you care about the outcome, not a sign that you are underprepared. The candidates who perform best under time pressure are not the ones who feel no anxiety — they are the ones who have learned to keep it from driving behaviour in the exam hall.
Two practical anchors help. First, structure. A specific plan for each of the 15 days — subject, blocks, mock, revision — eliminates the ambient dread of "am I doing the right thing?" that unfocused revision creates. The plan above is that structure. When you have a clear task for the next three hours, the anxiety has nowhere to expand.
Second, mandatory daily rest. Protect at least one genuine break every day — a meal without notes, a walk, a conversation with someone not studying for INI-CET. The brain consolidates the day's revision during rest, not during the next revision session, and the candidates who eliminate all breaks in the final fortnight arrive at exam day on a declining retrieval curve rather than an ascending one. Burnout in the last three days is especially damaging because there is not enough time left to recover.
For a broader view of the preparation strategy that has built you to this point, the INI-CET hub covers the full arc from foundation through depth through delivery. The final 15 days are the delivery — and you are ready for them.
How NEETPGAI supports your final 15 days
NEETPGAI is designed around exactly the kind of targeted, high-volume, analysis-driven revision that the final fortnight demands — and the platform is free for every registered user.
A free 31,000+ MCQ bank with full explanations, so your subject sweep, recent-advances MCQ practice, and image-based drilling all run on the same verified question pool without a paywall.
INI-CET-pattern mock tests that mirror the 200-question, 4-block, no-back-navigation structure with +1/−1/3 marking — the same conditions you need to rehearse the per-block pacing and guessing calibration that determine your final rank.
Diagnostic analytics and percentile benchmarking that break your accuracy by subject and topic, so you know on any given revision day exactly where the gaps are instead of guessing at them.
An AI tutor that frames walkthroughs around applied reasoning and recent advances — useful during the subject sweep phase when you want a quick conceptual explanation without opening a new chapter.
The full MCQ bank, mock tests, revision, and analytics are free for every registered user. The AI tutor and advanced tools are part of the Pro plan, which covers NEET PG, INI-CET, and FMGE together. If you have not yet run a full-length INI-CET-pattern mock to benchmark your current rank readiness, do that on Day 15 before starting the revision rotation — it tells you which subjects need the most attention in Phase 1 and locks in your pacing baseline for Phase 2.
What should I do in the last 15 days before INI-CET?
In the last 15 days, split your time into three phases: Days 15–9 for a high-yield subject sweep paired with recent advances and image revision; Days 8–3 for full-length timed block mocks under INI-CET conditions with thorough mistake analysis; and Days 2–1 for a light recall pass over your personal mistake log, key formulae and values, logistics, and early sleep. Avoid cramming new content in the final 48 hours — your recall peaks on consolidated, well-rested memory.
How many mocks should I take in the last two weeks before INI-CET?
Aim for one full-length 200-question, 180-minute INI-CET block-format mock every alternate day during Days 8–3 — roughly three to four mocks. Each mock must apply the real +1/−1/3 marking and the four-block, no-back-navigation structure. The mock is only as valuable as its post-exam audit: separate losses into knowledge gaps, pacing errors, and negative-marking miscalibration, then feed knowledge gaps back into your next revision block.
Should I start new topics in the last 15 days before INI-CET?
No. The last 15 days are for consolidating what you already know, not for covering new ground. New chapters introduced now compete with older, well-practised material for retrieval slots and typically underperform both in retention and in exam confidence. Focus on high-yield revision, recent advances you have already noted, and mistake-log review — these deliver far more rank uplift per hour than a new chapter at this stage.
How should I handle recent advances in the last 15 days?
Pair your subject sweep with a daily 30–45 minute recent-advances block. Use a curated advances list — new drug approvals, guideline updates, revised staging or classifications — and practise them as applied MCQs, not as passive reading. INI-CET regularly tests recent advances in applied formats, so training recall through active MCQ practice is more valuable than reading a list again.
How do I revise image-based questions in the final fortnight?
Dedicate a 30–45 minute daily block to image pattern review. Work through your collected images systematically: radiographs, CT/MRI, pathology slides, ECGs, fundoscopy, and clinical photos. For each image, practise naming the modality, describing the finding, then reaching the diagnosis before reading the label — the same sequence you will execute in the exam. Freshening pattern recognition in the final 15 days directly lifts your score on the 15–25% of the paper that is image-based.
What is the best way to use mock tests in the last 15 days before INI-CET?
Take mocks under exact INI-CET conditions: 200 MCQs, 180 minutes, 4 blocks of 50, no backward navigation, and −1/3 applied honestly. After each mock, run a 3-bucket audit — knowledge gaps, pacing errors, and negative-marking miscalibration — then address each bucket separately: feed knowledge gaps back into the next revision block, adjust your per-block pacing target if you are running over or under, and recalibrate your guessing threshold if you are consistently attempting questions you cannot eliminate down to two options.
How does the INI-CET −1/3 marking affect the last 15 days strategy?
The −1/3 penalty (for MD/MS) should shape how you train guessing during the mock phase. The correct calibration is: attempt when you can eliminate at least one or two options cleanly; leave blank on a pure four-way guess. Use your mock data to find your actual accuracy below different confidence levels and lock in the threshold before exam day. Changing your guessing behaviour on exam day without pre-tested calibration is a rank-damaging risk.
What should I do on the last two days before INI-CET?
Days 2 and 1 are a taper, not a sprint. Spend a couple of hours on a light recall pass over your personal mistake log, key normal values, formulae, classification tables, and recent-advances flashcards — nothing new. Confirm exam day logistics: admit card, ID proof, exam centre route and timing, what you can and cannot bring. Sleep at least seven to eight hours both nights. A well-rested brain retrieves faster and makes fewer pacing errors than an overtired one — the last 48 hours are when sleep earns you more marks than extra revision does.
How do I avoid burnout in the last 15 days before INI-CET?
Protect one genuine daily break — a meal without notes, a 20-minute walk, or a short wind-down before sleep — and schedule it rather than treating it as something you earn only after finishing everything. Structured rest is not lost study time; it consolidates the day's revision and resets focus. The candidates who burn out in the final week underperform their actual preparation because fatigue collapses retrieval speed and amplifies pacing errors under time pressure.
Is it too late to change strategy 15 days before INI-CET?
Not for refining strategy — but it is too late for a complete rebuild. What you can profitably change now: your per-block pacing target based on mock data, your guessing calibration, the specific topics you revisit, and how much image-review time you schedule each day. What you cannot profitably change: your overall preparation depth or coverage of brand-new subjects. Work within what you have and optimise execution.
How does NEETPGAI help in the last 15 days before INI-CET?
NEETPGAI gives you a free MCQ bank with full explanations for targeted high-yield revision, INI-CET-pattern mock tests that mirror the 200-question block format and −1/3 marking, and diagnostic analytics that break your accuracy by subject and topic so you know exactly where to spend your final revision hours. The AI tutor is available for applied, recent-advances question walkthroughs during the subject sweep phase. Start your free INI-CET revision on NEETPGAI →
You have done the preparation. The last 15 days are about executing it well. A focused high-yield sweep, structured image revision, calibrated mock practice under real block conditions, and a calm taper into exam day — that is the plan. Begin your final revision on NEETPGAI today and track your rank readiness as you go.
Written by: NEETPGAI Editorial Team
Reviewed by: NEETPGAI Medical Advisory Board
Last reviewed: June 2026
Exam pattern, marking scheme, and block structure are summarised from AIIMS New Delhi (the conducting body, aiimsexams.ac.in); always verify your cohort's specific requirements and the current session's notification on the official AIIMS portal before planning. Study plan timings and phase structures are editorial recommendations and should be adapted to your individual schedule and preparation level. This article is reviewed for accuracy and exam relevance. For corrections or updates, contact the editorial team.
