Year 2015 GS Prelims paper
- The Paper portrayed a departure from the trend of last 4 years. While many traditional questions were from non-traditional sources and inferential, many current affairs questions were very simple and straight forward eg NITI Ayog, Jandhan Yojna etc.
- Paper was more factual compared to papers of CSAT era.
- More focus on current affairs as many questions were inspired from news. Instead of linking the current affairs to concepts it was more on factual side.
- Proportion of unapproachable questions remained on similar trends as previous year.
- Polity has moved towards traditional concepts compared to last year trend of is moving towards governance and public administration type questions.
- Some economy questions were on the lines of 2013 paper i.e. conceptual and analytical.
- Deceptive presentation is a common method to segregate deep knowledge with superficial knowledge or hunch. This technique was used in many questions.
- Some questions were too easy (E.g. Fortaleza declaration, H1N1 etc). This does not mean that we should not have proper knowledge of topic (Eg. NFC required complete knowledge of the topic).
- Pointers for most of the questions could be traced to The Hindu but as recommended earlier, in the age of internet, complete knowledge of topic is expected (CSB issue was in news consistently, TFA issue led to the question about AoA of WTO).
Suggestions:
- Read Basic/standard books, one Good News Paper (like The Hindu) and use internet extensively as almost 80% questions could be attempted with this combination.
- Have keen perception about things going around you and assume less and less. After reading newspaper always clarify key terms from internet or books or teachers.
- Read one good book on each traditional subjects this will help in prelims, mains and interview i.e. all stages of examination. This will also help in making some unapproachable question approachable.
- This year with the inclusion of factual questions and state civil service/State Services type one liners, it is advisable to be ready for analytical and factual questions at the same time. It is expected that UPSC will not ask irrelevant facts (Date on which someone died type asked in state civil service) but important facts should not be ignored.
- Do not ignore your strong areas to do research in weak areas. You should be able to answer most of the questions from your strong areas.
- Nearly 60% of the questions were very basic which could have been answered by reading elementary books and newspapers. Strategy should be to avoid negative marking in tough questions and maximize your score by first finding the easy ones and completing them.