Should You Solve Irodov for JEE Advanced? An Honest Answer
A guide to I.E. Irodov’s Problems in General Physics, checked section by section against the JEE Main and JEE Advanced syllabuses.
Most students who ask this question should not open the book. That is not the answer the internet usually gives, so here is the reasoning, with the numbers it rests on.
Key insight. Irodov is not a JEE book that happens to be hard. It is a Russian university problem set that happens to overlap the JEE syllabus, and the overlap is smaller than its reputation suggests. Knowing exactly where the overlap falls is worth more than any amount of grinding through it in order.
The numbers
Irodov contains 1,878 problems across 40 sections. Checking every section against the current syllabus gives this:
| Sections | Problems | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully on the JEE Advanced syllabus | 14 | 713 | 38% |
| Partly usable — some problems in, some beyond | 19 | 932 | 50% |
| Not on the syllabus at all | 7 | 233 | 12% |
Seven whole sections are outside the syllabus: Relativistic Mechanics, Phase Transformations, Electromagnetic Waves and Radiation, Dispersion and Absorption of Light, Optics of Moving Sources, Molecules and Crystals, and Elementary Particles. Working through those is not hard practice. It is no practice at all.
Of the 19 partly-usable sections, roughly half the problems are worth attempting, which puts the sensible target at somewhere near 1,100 to 1,200 problems — about three-fifths of the book.
What that costs in hours
Assume fifteen to twenty minutes per problem. That is generous for a strong aspirant on an easy one and far too little on a hard one, but it averages out about right.
- The 14 fully-in-scope sections alone — 713 problems — take roughly 180 to 240 hours. At two hours a day, three to four months.
- Everything worth attempting, near 1,164 problems, takes roughly 300 to 400 hours. At two hours a day, five to six months of physics, and physics is one of three subjects.
Those hours are the real question, not whether the book is good. It is good. The question is whether these are the best three hundred hours available to you, and for most candidates they are not.
If you are preparing for JEE Main only, close the book
The JEE Main syllabus carries none of the following, every one of which is on the JEE Advanced syllabus: the Carnot engine and its efficiency; free, forced and damped oscillations and resonance outside a.c. circuits; the Doppler effect in sound; Newton’s law of cooling; Reynolds number; geostationary orbits; the cyclotron; and the magnetic properties of materials.
For a Main candidate that guts the book further — the whole of the Second Law and Entropy section goes, and large parts of Mechanical Oscillations, Acoustics, Hydrodynamics and Magnetics with it. More to the point, Main rewards accuracy and speed on standard problems inside a tight clock. Irodov trains the opposite habit: sitting with one problem for half an hour. That is a real skill, and it is not the one Main measures.
Who should use it
Open Irodov if all four of these are true.
You are targeting JEE Advanced, not Main alone. You have already worked through the standard material and can handle HC Verma-level problems without looking at the solution. You have at least six months before the exam. And you want the specific thing Irodov teaches, which is not knowledge — it is the habit of setting a problem up from nothing, in symbols, with no template to match it against and no worked example nearby.
That last point is the honest case for the book. Most Indian problem sets train pattern recognition: see the shape, recall the method. Irodov gives you a physical situation and no shape to recognise, and the skill of building the equations yourself is exactly what separates a good Advanced score from an average one.
Who should not
If NCERT is not yet solid, Irodov will teach you nothing except that physics is demoralising. Work through the textbook properly first — our full solutions are here for Class 11 Physics and Class 12 Physics, chapter by chapter with the answer key’s errors explained where they occur.
If you are inside three months of the exam, the return on revision and past papers is far higher, and the risk of losing a fortnight to relativity problems that cannot be asked is real.
And if the reason is that Irodov is what serious candidates are supposed to solve — that is the worst reason of all, and it is the commonest one.
The three mistakes people make with Irodov
Working through it in book order. Section 1.8 is Relativistic Mechanics: 49 consecutive problems, none of which can be asked. Follow the book from the front and you will spend a fortnight on those before you have attempted a single problem on electrostatics — and Electrodynamics carries as much in-scope work as the whole of Mechanics does.
Reading the answer instead of building the setup. Irodov prints answers and hints, not solutions, and that is deliberate. If you look up the number after copying someone else’s setup, you have practised arithmetic. The setup was the problem.
Starting it to feel serious rather than to fix a weakness. A student who cannot yet write the constraint equation for two blocks and a pulley does not need harder problems. They need that one, again, until it is automatic.
What to do instead, in order
Finish NCERT and be able to do every exercise question cold. Then HC Verma, both volumes, which is the book most JEE Advanced candidates should actually be solving. Then ten years of previous papers, properly timed. Then, if months remain and Advanced is the target, the in-scope sections of Irodov, in the order that suits your preparation rather than the order the book prints them.
Where to go from here
The section-by-section maps say which problems in each part are worth attempting and which to skip, with the syllabus entry behind every call: