June 20, 2023
Before starting your actual preparation you should have some adequate time in hand to cover the syllabus that is why you should start at least 10 to 12 month in advance.
Some students ask that they can prepare for prelims in just 3 or 4 months time. Well, you can only prepare for the prelims in 3 or 4 months. But only if you have prior experience or gotten through the prelims before and covered the entire syllabus once. Then you can obviously prepare in just 3 month depending on your preparation level or caliber. But, if you are new or fresher in this entire civil services examination process. Then you should start preparing for the prelims ideally before 10 to 12 months in advance. In that first 3 to 4 months self study and after that you may join a coaching institute for prelims cum mains preparation. In Career Plus we start with Mains cum Prelims preparation of GS along with Optional subject preparation and cover-up all syllabuses in seven to eight months. After prelims exam we focus only on revision part and practice session. We also provide special tips for General Hindi/Indian language and General English papers including Essay.
Before joining coaching institute Next step is to go through the entire prelims Syllabus of General Studies Paper – 1 & Paper 2 and syllabus of mains G.S., just to get the overview of whole prelims syllabus. So, assess the syllabus and If you don’t want to get the book. But it’s always better to have a book in hand. There is always better you can readily refer to it. You cannot login to your computer every time or internet while preparing, that is a distraction in itself. So handy books will always help you.
Next step included to know your comfort level with the exam. If you are a complete beginner to the entire IAS exam then you might be wondering; Am I capable of clearing this exam? Of course, you are very much capable even if you don’t have any basic knowledge. But having some basic knowledge will help you.
Another point in the Planning Process. After gone through the complete syllabus is to get right Books, Magazines & Newspaper for your prelim preparation. As well as the Newspaper is concerned, I always suggest any reputed English/Hindi national newspaper. News papers. As far as magazines are concerned, read one good Current Affairs magazine, like Civil Services Chronicle, Just one is enough. But, along with the current affairs magazine also read any political magazine too, questions are asked in mains particularly. You can skip the political and ideological part of it and concentrate on the Environment, Science & Technology part.
UPSC Prelims 2019 – Exam Pattern
The UPSC Prelims comprises of two objective type papers (General Studies I and General Studies II or CSAT) for a total of 400 marks. Both papers are usually held on the same day in two sessions via offline mode (pen-paper).
The UPSC Prelims date for Admit Card was announced on the official website of UPSC 2-3 weeks before the date of the exam.
UPSC Prelims Exam Pattern General Studies I General Studies II or CSAT
Number of questions 100 80
Negative Marking Yes (1/3rd of the maximum marks for the question)
-0.66 marks for every incorrect answer Yes (1/3rd of the maximum marks for the question)
-0.83 marks for every incorrect answer
Duration of exam 2 hours 2 hours
UPSC Prelims 2019 Date of exam June 2, 2019 June 2, 2019
Language of exam English/Hindi English/Hindi
Maximum marks 200 200
Cut Off marks Counted for Merit. Cutoff varies every year. 33% qualifying criteria (66 marks)
IMPLEMENTATION is the second part of prelims preparation. Now you have got the syllabus, right books, subscribed to the newspaper and magazines. So, once you start preparing for the prelims, How you should? You should not try to cover entire syllabus at once or all the topics like, trying to read History, Geography, Polity, General Mental Ability everything at once. You know, this is not a right approach.
The right approach is to pick one topic in Paper – 1 and pick 1 topic from Paper – 2 and you can divide it accordingly or may be study Paper – 1 in the morning and Paper – 2 by afternoon or in the evening. But don’t go more that 2 topics. Let’s say you pick Modern India History from Paper – 1 & General Mental Ability from Paper – 2 and prepare this simultaneously. Apart from these you should develop a habit of reading newspapers from at least minimum one hour everyday without fail and this is more than adequate.
Focus on the particular topics like:
• Editorials
• News articles of National interest
• Sports news
• Business news
• And Science & Technology, these are the important topics.
Whenever you start with a topic, you should complete it before starting a new one and it is very important. This will help you in the third step of preparation.
Importance of Testing – Many people actually leave the Testing part, but testing part of your preparation is basically like taking MOCK Test, attempting the previous year’s questions and that is the part of testing right till the end. But by that time, it is very very late to attempt course corrections because if you identified your weakness or you found that you are not prepared well for the particular part of the subject. Then in the date when you actually prepare a new topic. Once you have covered a topic, refer the past Ten Years question papers on that topic. In Career Plus we always use this strategy. Joining a coaching will help you in this. And if you find that you have left certain topics and not covered very well, again you can go in through that, so you can attempt Course Correction right at that time itself. This is very good instead of leaving it. Getting passed in very easy, just have to do these basics in the right way. Obviously Hard work is involved but that Smart Work, If you can do that you will surely succeed in prelims.
BOX
Ranking 5th in the index of Toughest Exams in the World, the Civil Service Examination, conducted by UPSC is the dream of about half the youth of our nation. This fact is established with these figures:
Registration: More than 10 lakh aspirants/year;
Preliminary Exam Takers: Around 4.5 Lakhs/year;
Those who pass Prelim: Around 15000/year;
Those who pass mains: 3000/year;
Those who find mention in rank list after interview: 1000/year.
Note: As 49.5% seats are reserved, if you are from general category, you may need to be in the top 50% to ensure a place in the final rank list.
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