Divyanshu Nigam IAS strategy for Prelims

Divyanshu Nigam IAS AIR 44 UPSC CSE 2020 

General Points

1. Remember its just an exam that you have to Qualify (and not ace)…so prepare like that. It just the hall ticket to Mains. Prelims won’t make you IAS or anything. Hence don’t give more than 65-70 days for its preparation….anything more is futile and improper use of time.

2. This may be called as a traditionally humanities exam but in my opinion the preparation has to be done in a very scientific manner based of data and numbers…after all its a game of numbers, at all stage. So always measure and track your performance and learn/analyse from that data. 

3. This is more of a game of your attitude than your knowledge. Presence of mind is immensely important and can beat knowledge any day. Particularly paper like CSE Pre 2020 can be qualified based on option elimination and intelligent guessing.

4. Keeping positive attitude while attempting exam is extremely important. Often you know the answer and you just get over-critical of yourself and end up leaving the question or wrongly attempting.

5. Your two biggest enemies — Overthinking (Over complicating) and Over-confidence (esp if its from your strong area) … be cautious of these two.

6. Give around 20 Full Tests (and sectional tests as per your liking) … and develop a strategy. This exam is very scientific now and you need to have a well-prepared strategy now. Get a safe number of question attempt (around 85) which can easily make you cross the cutoff. For any year…assume cutoff to be 105 …this will help your gauge your performance. 

Vision IAS and Forum IAS test series are good here (don’t give Insights) 

Disclaimer — all this is purely based on my experiences and journey as an UPSC aspirant. You can take it or leave it and others may have different experience. Don’t take any topper’s advice as divine advice. You must use your own mind and cherry-pick advices, which you resonate with.