Civil Services Examination in Corona Times need for a sound strategy

08-08-2020 00:00:00 8830

For the first time since inception, the prestigious Civil Services Examination (CSE) has been postponed. The preliminary examination was originally fixed to be held on May 31, 2020 but has been now rescheduled to October 04, 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit education in an unprecedented way. Not only the CSE, but all kinds of exams are put on hold with aspiring candidates staring at an uncertain future. This has raised a fundamental question: how to navigate the path of education, competition, jobs in such uncertain times? There are no easy answers to this. In this article, an attempt is made to help the CSE aspirants grasp the situation more clearly and resolve their dilemmas:

Mental Health: The stress caused by an isolated life under prolonged lockdown is bound to result in mental fatigue. Among the youth, it is causing pessimism, frustration, impatience as reported globally. Sudden withdrawal from human connections leads to such negative developments. This can demotivate a candidate with an adverse impact on his/her performance. Awareness about Mental Health will lead to better handling of one's emotions. Perseverance is the key to success. It requires one to carry on till a task is completed. Cultivation of emotional intelligence can be supremely helpful to acquire new, fresh perspectives on life and its challenges. Emotional intelligence helps in better understanding of what we are going through. With deeper insight and clearer vision, one can face challenges like the one put before us by the present pandemic.

Physical Health: Sedentary, confined lifestyle is bound to create health issues. With limited access to hospitals, doctors and medicine shops, one has to go for preventive health care. This can be done by regulating food, sleep, indoor exercise etc.

Academic Health: This is a foundational requirement for success. What it implies is that your pursuit of the syllabus must be as robust as your health. The pre - Corona period offered many support systems like coaching, library readings, attending real time test series, discussions with mentors, buying books, journals, newspapers, exchanging ideas with peers, etc. Unfortunately, these supports do not exist in the present situation and one may have to go on without them in the near future. What is to be done then? The obvious choice is to shift to online support. It comes in multiple ways. There are online classes for all subjects. Coaching activities are shifting online. Newspapers and journals are available online. Test series too are available aplenty online. But an element of caution is to be exercised while choosing these platforms. All kinds of self styled experts are crowding the online platform with no known credentials in the subjects. Choosing one with authentic credentials is important or else, there will be no substantive gain. Try to see how knowledgeable your mentors are. Are they teaching something new or just repeating the text books and coaching material and news articles. This can be managed in a better way by organising self study. For the basic reading, if one relies on NCERT books, there is hardly any need to attend classes. It can be pursued solely by self study as these books are written in simple language that can be grasped easily. Many parts can be done by self study, especially those which require gathering information and facts. If you develop a knack for gathering right and relevant information by flipping through past years' questions, then you really don't need to invest time and money doing it. However, this is not to suggest that you can do everything by yourself. This only means that you must realise that you can do pretty much by yourself. However, there will be many challenging parts of the syllabus, which you may not be able to cope up with. For those parts, you need support of a good mentor. A good mentor is one who is knowledgeable, articulate, expressive and who can stimulate your intellect by providing not only information but qualities like good vocabulary, right terminologies and good writing skills.

Emphasis on standard sources: The civil services exam has evolved in a manner that seeks to test your original, in depth grasp over the syllabus which can come from cultivating standard reading habits. For each area of study, there are good standard books available. You need to read them thoroughly. Most often, commercialized study materials have very little to offer other than compilation. For example, reading constitution from P M Bakshi's book which contains articles and short explanations is better than compiled books on polity. For core subjects like history, geography, economy and polity, there is no substitute to standard text books. Even on areas like social issues, international relations, good books are available. You need compilation for current affairs, not for static portions of the syllabus. In fact, when you read from a good standard source, your understanding is much better on a topic compared to compiled sources.

Avoid over doing test series: While it is necessary to do sample tests for both prelims and mains, one should do it judiciously. Wasting your time on questions which have been framed to give you" fifty plus test series” experience is really of not much use because most of them are not worthy of being asked in the exam. You will simply waste time and energy doing something which is least likely to be asked. A better way is to read the text books more minutely. Even for test series, you should do original questions of UPSC asked in the last ten years or so. A good command over text book based information is better than a poorly planned test series.

Priority to Current Affairs: The backbone of the Civil Services Exam is Current Affairs. It is wide, diverse, and challenging. It just can't be commanded overnight. You develop a good understanding of current issues only by continuous efforts. It cannot come from one or two sources. Reading from a combination of newspapers, journals, TV news analysis by experts etc can bolster your preparations on current affairs. Regular discussions, exchange of ideas and perspectives with mentors can help build good current affairs.

Strategy for Prelims:

CSAT: Since it is of qualifying nature, a score of around 40% is enough (though only 33% is needed), in this paper. If you are strong in comprehension part of CSAT, concentrate more on that, or if you are good in math and reasoning, make it so good that you get the minimum percentage in CSAT. Last five or six years’ questions on CSAT will give you a sense of the level of questions and let you assess your strengths and weaknesses.

General Studies (Prelims): In this paper, one can get at least 50 questions from four core areas viz; history, polity, geography and economics. If you read important chapters on these core areas from books and solve last 20 years’ questions asked by UPSC, you can handle this portion smoothly.

Current Affairs: For the upcoming prelims exam, it's very difficult to grasp the range of questions due to long disruption caused by the lockdown. Usually, the prelims questions are ready two months before the exam. It means questions were set before 25th March when lockdown was announced. In that case, current affairs should be covered for one year or so. More specifically, you should do current topics of the period between January 2019 to March 2020. Though many new topics have emerged since March, 2020, but given the dislocation of life during this period, setting of new questions would pose challenges. In my view, some new questions on corona virus, vaccine efforts, how it has impacted the economy, India China border issues, Chinese claims on Bhutan territories might be asked if UPSC can set such questions from in house efforts . Therefore, given the uncertain nature of current affairs this year, one must try and do well in core syllabus i.e static portions.

Suggested Books:

History Ancient India