How to Crack UPSC exam in FIRST attempt? Some insights by Manuj Jindal IAS

hi everyone I hope all of you guys are doing well so today one of the questions that I get very frequently asked by a lot of aspiran is Sir how can I crack the upsc exam in the first attempt and today I'm going to try to answer this question but before I answer this question I'm going to have a little bit of a disclaimer and the disclaimer is that you can only increase the probability of you Crossing this exam in the first attempt itself you can only increase the Poss probability by 20% 30% 40% 60% but you can never know for sure whether you going to crack in the first attempt or not because of the level of this exam because there are so many levels in this exam there's is prelims which requires you to do objective selection of options which are given of various subjects from economics to poity to environment and then there is an entire answer writing you know an answer writing component where you have to actually write answers for different subjects for different topics you have to write essay you have to write optional so that is why this the breadth of this exam means that it is going to be very difficult to say for sure any formula that can help you to crack this in first attempt but definitely if you study properly if you have a certain way to study proper way of planning using your time then definitely your probability of cracking this in first attempt goes very high so the first thing that is very important is understanding the demands of this exam in order to increase your probability of qualifying in the first attempt for this exam it is very very important that you understand the demands of this exam and today I'm going to tell you a little differently how you can understand the demands of this exam okay so first of all I would like to divide an aspirants Journey for UPS exam exam into three different parts an aspirent Journey can be divided into three different parts one is when you're a beginner when you're starting your upsc journey then you are intermediate and then you Advanced now this does not depend on the level of attempts if you have done two three attempts you might still be stuck as a beginner you might still have not learned your lessons and move to the intermediate or an advanced stage so let it make me let it let me make it very clear to you that where you are in this particular stage is not going to depend on whether you have done 2 3 years four years 5 years into this particular exam Journey what is important for you to realize is how you are quickly able to adopt learn and figure out whether you are here or here and then try to move here okay so I'm going to spell out various components I feel that are important in order for you to understand how you can crack it in first attempt and how you can be at the advanced level so that you can try to get here your probability can increase to try to get here okay so now when you are a new aspirant what happens is you end up just chasing a lot of books whatever books are available in the market you are just confused you are not reading much of them but you're chasing all of them you are just writing down the name of the books you're buying the books you're becoming a collector of the books and they're just lying around and you are just chasing all these books sometimes you are reading bipin Chandra sometimes you reading spectrum and then you're getting confused then you are a person who are reading all different kind of reports different kind of current affairs let me add to this current affairs any kind of current affairs that are coming in the news especially on Twitter nowadays I have seen a lot of threats on Twitter where people are just talking about any random news news any news comes out they will do an analysis and put that online that is not the way to go for upsc exam you have to know what is important what is not important where if you put efforts you're going to get output and where if you're going to put efforts you're going to not get output So reading all the reports or all the current affairs all the newspapers very very bad idea then thirdly you might be someone who is doing lot of detailed notes lot of repository huge repository of notes you have you are writing writing writing making notes all day but you are not understanding anything your concepts are not clear so if you're spending a lot of time on writing a lot making a lot of notes making a repository of notes that is not enough you have to actually apply your mind understand the subject and then probably alongside make notes only where you need to revise where you need to actually go back and find out the keywords the concepts you know some of the definitions Etc you don't need to make notes of everything because obviously you're not going to be able to use them to revise or remember all of them then fourth one is you're aimlessly going to the coaching and you are not really learning anything see you cannot treat this particular exam like a college exam or a college degree where you can go to a classroom sit there spend your entire day make notes come back and then you will pass pass in the exam this is a competition where you're going to do your best don't think about other people but aimlessly just going to mukarji nagar or old rajender nagar and spending your time there thinking that since you're attending class you will qualify for I exam that is not going to happen in fact I always tell students that this is a big problem in the upsc exam that everyone thinks that coaching will make you qualify you need coaching for qualifying even some of the most knowledgeable people around there you know some of the people in the media some of the influencers or high ranking people they think that you have to go to the coaching in order to clarify for this exam however that is completely a huge huge misunderstanding about how this exam Works in fact upsc is probably one of the few exams out there for which you don't need guidance from out weite there are plenty of YouTube sources and if you study properly you can definitely qualify for this exam without any coaching at all look at the old papers and you will realize that the nature of the questions that they are asking if it was true that you need to go to coaching institutes to clarify uh to uh clear this exam then how come every year there is surprises in the exam that coaching is not able to ever predict so that is something Food For Thought for you that depending on coaching industry depending on these classes is not enough is never going to be enough in fact you need to study yourself and like I said spending hours on newspapers and not Concepts a lot of times I feel that students keep spending time on newspapers because coaching institutes also give a lot of lot of importance to current affairs and newspapers because that is where they make their business however this exam is more about Concepts and less about newspapers less about current affairs once you understand these Concepts then it is very easy to apply and understand what is happening in the current affairs what is happening in the newspapers in fact lot of time you will spend time reading news which is absolutely not useful so these are the problems that lot of beginners they go into and if they can eliminate these problems if they can move to the advanced intermediate stage faster then definitely the chances of cracking the upsc exam increase the probability increases quite a lot now what is the intermediate level where you want to be you want to be here you want to be a person who understands these things you want to understand the nature of the exam how the exam is and once you understand the nature of the exam then it's very easy to then prepare your studies and completely design your studies around that so what are the nature of the exam well understand that there are three stages there is prelims there is Mains there is interview you cannot prepare for the interview from the first day you have to wait for yourself to clear your prelims and Mains to prepare for this interview which is a 30 minute personality test and what this means is you just need to have a pleasant confident personality where you have a objective view of things you have the ability to to not let your emotions and your predispositions your ideology come between the issues of the day they are asking you about rather you should be honest Pleasant confident and something who's presentable in front of the board if you are not that then you have to be quite outstanding like in 12th field we saw you know kind of a very different kind of a candidate but if you want to clear the interview stage with good marks these are the things they're expecting from you they look at your profile and they expect you to be well read and pleasant confident and objective and be able to answer questions that you are expected to sort of know so for this you cannot really prepare much in advance except ensuring that you are not developing a kind of a personality which is fake which is not authentic be your authentic self and this will become a much easier stage for you to clear the problem is this stage and this stage and mostly this stage Mains because even this stage prelims depends on Main so first of all understand the prelims stage understand that this is not a stage where you need to be accurate highly accurate you don't need to be highly accurate but you need to understand how to be able to eliminate and how to be able to guess smartly this is very very important the second thing you need to understand about prelims is that there are three type of questions asked in prelims one is that any upsc aspirant anyone who has studied even a little bit seriously supposed to know so the easy questions these will be around 25 to 35 in out of 100 questions GS I'm talking about not cat right now but even for csat this should apply that there are going to be 25 to 35 easy questions that any aspirant can answer if they have studied somewhat seriously for this exam you should definitely get all these questions correct these are the questions that are coming from papers like environment from Po from economics which have a heavy heavy base in the upsc paper technology then there are these moderate type of questions these are little bit more hard and someone who has not studied seriously enough will not get these questions correct you need to be someone who has studied the books the sources properly and apply thinking in order to answer these questions so these will be at least another 15 to 25 questions so almost 50 to 55 or 60 Questions are going to be in the easi and moderate category which can be answered by you if you have studied relatively seriously and then the hard questions are going to be the ones that are going to surpress surprise you and everyone is going to talk about these hard questions after the exam last year when the upsc prelims happened everyone went absolutely buerk saying how hard it was yes it was a difficult paper but it was only difficult here these were still the same easy and moderate category was still the same the hard category got a little harder so in the hard category you not expected to get right most of the questions in fact whatever questions you answer here you are going to get 50 60% wrong and rest you are going to get right so this is where your intelligent guessing works and this you have to develop with studying with practicing with doing a lot of papers with understanding the syllabus with understanding the pattern of the prelims what is the pattern of the prelims 70 60 to 70% questions come from environment Tech economy and Po and if you master these particular four subjects which are are definitely doable then easy moderate and some of the hard questions will be solved you will always have you will also you will have at least 80% accuracy in this 60 to 70% Mark and that is how you will qualify so prelims is a test of elimination it is supposed to get people who are not prepared out of the system and people who are serious and prepared into the mains category so that is how you should think about this exam be systematic break down the paper into different parts environment economy hard questions easy questions moderate questions questions that are coming from your traditional sources and master them Master them day in and day out put time in that and master them and when the mains paper comes realize one very important part an average answer in Mains is better than a stellar answer in Mains what I mean by that is if you write only 12 questions in mains paper gs1 GS2 but they are Stellar written in a stellar way but if you write 17 to 18 average answers this is going to get you more marks because here you are not displaying your breadth of knowledge here you are displaying a breadth of knowledge and that is what is required from a journalist exam okay so have a set of list of books and master them and then use others so use the books that are there Master them and then so for example people ask me sir you recommended bipin Chandra for history but then you said read Stellar also Spectrum also sorry what I meant by that is Master One book master let's say bipin Chandra for history okay but then when you get bored of this book you can come back and revise from Spectrum you can revise from spectrum and then you will get some additional information which will be good for your knowledge addition but most of the things are the same you know 80% both books are same just that they are given in different formats so when I give you two three book list two three books for one subject what I mean is use one book to become a master and use others to revise that way you are comprehensively covering various parts of the exam you're not getting bored your monotony is getting broken and you also able to revise the same content in different ways so it will stick better in your brain Okay so remember this rule average is better than Stellar in Mains and then how you can Master a set of books and Main answer writing Mains is all about answer writing how well you know how to write answers and for that I'm obviously writing a book and I'm going to uh share that with you very soon okay finally someone who understand this exam really well will understand these things also these are almost the same but some additional things first there are high reward areas like I discussed with you these are the high reward areas Master them absolutely Inside Out prelims again focus on the scoring subjects like these I have also told you this already and remember that it is the mains who will get you through prelims is just a qualifying exam so if you are putting all your energy in prelims but nothing in Mains that is bad so always start backwards start with Mains if you have another 1 and a half 2 years in front of you the way you want to prepare for upsc start with Mains finish Mains and then go to prelims or parallely because syllabus is almost the same except a few differences so you have to start with Mains this is what you have to focus on but along the way obviously you have to study for prelims because without this you can't get here so it's a chicken and a peg problem but the way you have to think about it is that let me first Master my main syllabus because a lot of it is overlapping with prelims anyways prelims is more about practice practice practice of previous year questions and question Banks mock test series which you can do in 3 4 months four to 5 months of time so once you have done with this then if you spend four five months on this you have a very good place where you're standing to clear this exam okay okay so these are the few things that I wanted to discuss with you about today I wanted to keep it short maybe I will add more things because obviously this is not a comprehensive thing I have not discussed essay I have not discussed csat but I wanted to give you an overview to keep these things in mind when you're preparing for upsc because a lot of times we get lost in all this noise that is out there but if we think keep things simple this exam with application of mind is definitely crackable doable passable and you can definitely get a very good rank okay thanks have a good day hope you have a great day today and let me know if you have any questions bye

Channel: Manuj Jindal IAS

Views: 151,233

Keywords:

Id: _3o6ktRR6T0

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024