This is a fair plan, and it works for some people
സൗജന്യ ക്ലാസുകൾ നല്ലതാണ്. പക്ഷേ അത് മാത്രം മതിയോ?
There is more good free civil engineering teaching available now than at any point in history. Some of it is excellent. Some of it is ours — we put classes on YouTube every week and a free live class runs nightly, and I would rather you watched those than bought something you did not need.
So this is not the part where I explain that free things are bad. It is the part where I am specific about what a video can and cannot do, because "I'll just watch free videos" is a plan, and plans deserve to be examined.
What video is genuinely excellent at
Explaining. A good teacher on video is as good as a good teacher in a room for the purpose of making a concept make sense, and you can pause and rewind, which you cannot do in a classroom.
For understanding a topic for the first time, free video has essentially closed the gap. That is a genuinely good thing and it is why the objection in this article's title is so reasonable.
The four things it cannot do
Not "does not currently" — cannot, because of what a video is.
1 · It cannot decide the order
A playlist is not a syllabus. The videos that exist are the ones somebody felt like making, weighted towards topics that are interesting to explain rather than towards topics that carry marks. The dull, heavily weighted chapter that decides your rank is exactly the one nobody made a good video about.
And you will not notice the gap, because a gap looks like nothing at all.
2 · It cannot measure you
You finish a video feeling you understood it — and as I have argued elsewhere, that feeling is the least reliable signal in preparation. Watching is recognition. The exam wants recall, and no amount of watching tests recall.
This is the real cost of a video-only plan. Not that you learn nothing. That you have no way of finding out how much you learnt until it is too late to act on.
3 · It cannot correct you
A video cannot see your wrong answer, because you never gave one. It cannot know you have reversed plan and map, or that you have been applying a superseded striking time for six months. It broadcasts; it does not respond.
4 · It cannot put you under exam conditions
No clock, no negative marking, no penalty for the guess. Those conditions are most of what makes the exam hard — and they are the one part of the experience that free content essentially never reproduces.
The playlist problem, in concrete terms
Free content is made by people choosing what to make, and that choice is not neutral. Topics that are satisfying to explain — the visual ones, the ones with a good demonstration, the ones with a story attached — get made repeatedly. Topics that are dull, list-heavy and memorisation-shaped do not.
The examiner's weighting has no relationship to that whatsoever.
So the topics that decide your rank are systematically under-served by free video, in direct proportion to how tedious they are. You end up with six explanations of the interesting chapter and none of the one carrying the marks — and because you never planned the coverage, that imbalance never shows up as a decision you made.
How to tell good free content from bad
Since you will use it either way, here is what I would check. It applies to our channel as much as anyone else's:
- Does it cite a source for its numbers? A value with a clause reference can be checked. A value stated flatly cannot.
- Does it distinguish editions? Anyone teaching code values without ever mentioning which edition is teaching from whatever they learned, whenever they learned it.
- Does it ever say "I am not certain"? Total confidence across every topic is a warning sign, not a qualification.
- Does it show the working, or only the answer? You cannot check an answer you were not shown the reasoning for.
So what should someone on a free-only plan actually do?
Genuinely, without trying to sell you anything, here is the version that works:
- Get the syllabus itself and tick topics off against it. Not a playlist — the actual syllabus for the post you are sitting.
- After every video, close it and write down what it covered before checking. This converts watching into recall and costs ten minutes.
- Get hold of past papers and sit them under a clock, with the negative marking applied. Papers are widely available. The clock is free.
- Keep a mistake book — every wrong answer, why you got it wrong, and which of the four kinds it was. Revisit it weekly.
- Cross-check any number you plan to memorise against a second source before you commit it.
That is a real plan and people do clear exams on it. Notice what it consists of, though: you are hand-building the syllabus map, the recall practice, the exam conditions, the correction loop and the fact-checking yourself, every week, for nine months, on top of a job.
The question was never whether free content can teach you. It is whether you can be the teacher, the examiner, the record-keeper and the fact-checker as well as the student.Santhosh Sir
Some people can. If you are already doing the five things above and keeping them up, you do not need us, and I would rather say so plainly.
And if you are not doing those five things
Then the honest description of a free-only plan is: excellent explanation, and none of the structure. Which is very close to the traditional classroom problem in a different form — the hour is good, and the other twenty-three are left to willpower.
▶Watch the free classes firstJudge the teaching before judging anything else. The channel is free and always will be.