This article is for those of you who will be appearing for the Prelims Examination 2015 on August 23. Next Sunday.
I want you to know, that the next 7 days is not about studying. Or preparing for the exam, clocking hours.
The next 7 days is all about battle of nerves. A lot of you maybe first timers – who are writing the exam for the first time. A lot of you may not be first timers. But both may have spent sleepless nights over the coming Sunday.
I want you to know that its normal. All of us, who have cleared the Prelims exam, or the Mains, have spent sleepless nights. Countless sleepless night.
I for one, have spent close to hundreds of sleepless nights over the Prelims, Mains and Interview – the night(s) before.
And I can assure you, that this is true for everyone. Even the successful ones – like ForumIAS member @bikerGuy, a former flatmate, who secured under Rank 40, this year. He screwed up his first Prelims because he moved out of our flat, to sleep in the comfort of his home. Couldn’t sleep all night long, because of change of location and bed, and well, screwed his first Prelims. ( His story did not end there, he got IRS the very next year and IAS this year, and I will get him to share his story soon )
So this is normal. You are normal. Being anxious, worried, tense or even being carefree and chilled out is normal.
You are quite capable of clearing the Prelims very much with your current knowledge level. But the difference between you and me is that you do not know it yet.
And I can assure you – that the Civil Services Examination is designed in a manner where things you have learnt over a period of time will be tested.
If you have not been able to study as much as you wanted, thats okay. If you have studied hard, even better.
What I want you to know is – you need to buckle up and gear up for the last 7 days. You may be fatigued, disinterested or too anxious or would be over studying – you could be doing any of those. But don’t give up.
The last seven days are crucial for you. By crucial I do not mean to say that you need to be clocking ten hours + a day.
By crucial, I mean, that you must do things that increase your confidence.
By crucial, I mean that what you do, or how you react will decide a lot about the next one year – whether you will be writing the Mains, the Interview and so on. It won’t change your life, however, no matter how much people tell you. ( Events like marriage etc are life changing, not an exam )
The last seven days should be all about revision. Revising , in particular subjects like Modern Indian History – especially the part after 1905 and events closer to Independence – by which I mean the period between 1919-1947
In Art & Culture, as @doodlebean would say, you can only do so much. You cannot master all of it, but you should know the basics, beyond which you can easily skip the question without worrying about its impact on your score.
Always always always remember that your success or failure in Prelims doesn’t depend on your answering or not answering the tough questions. It will rather depend on you answering or not answering the simple questions, which everyone else is answering.
Remember, there is no study material that is absolutely essential to be read to pass the exam. So you may not have done Culture well, because you are bad at memorising, but may have been a good student all throughout and will be able to answer questions quite decently and will see yourself through the exam.
Tons of people Crack IAS without ever having touched Culture , or even totally skipping environment section ( but not skipping History, Polity , Culture AND environment, so dont be too evasive )
So what should you do in the next 5-6 days?
0. Go through previous years paper one more time. Why? So that you can realign your preparation as per the demand of the examination.
Just like on the Internet, where we flock from one website to a totally unrelated and useless one, the same happens with our preparation. We start with something useful and important, but after a while, we are studying something totally off the mark. To restore and realign, going through previous years questions is the best way.
1. Keep Calm and maintain your focus. Do not, and I repeat do not make B plans or think about what after the exam. No post exam plans for now.
2. Revise subjects where memorising is rewarding – like Modern Indian History and basic Ancient History etc in the end. This will pay you rich dividends. Trust me.
3. If writing tests helps you, by all means write a few tests. Small Mini Tests – and DO NOT, I repeat – do not just sign up for any test which has been newly launched and is not of verified authenticity. That is a sure shot way to kill confidence.
4. Meditate. If you are having too many ideas flowing into your mind, mediatation will help keep calm and keep control.
5. As cliched as it may sound, and as redundant this statement may seem – be positive and be confident. A lot of people screw up the Prelims exam because of lack of confidence or fear taking over. This is especially true for those people who have failed in Prelims once.
The fear takes over. Let not that person be you.
So be confident, be positive, revise stuff that you have missed, tie up the lose ends, and once more go through the previous years exam papers, and even if you dont know something little or substantial , its okay.
Lastly, in the examination hall, and this is again important for those of you havent had cracked Prelims before take care of this.
Time Management.
You will have usually ample time in both the papers. However, if you are one of those who attempts each question cautiously, reading the questions twice – which I recommend ( but you may choose to go your way ), time management may become an issue in the exam hall.
Now that brings us to the question, how do you manage time in the Prelims Examination, so that you can safely read all questions and make a rational choice among the ones you want to attempt.
In the GS Paper , you have 120 minutes and 100 questions. This means, you must solve 10 questions every 12 minutes. or 6 questions every 5 minutes.
To be on the safer side, let us allocate 1 minutes for every ten questions. This will help you save time even if you exceed time limits. So at the end of every thirty minutes, do take a cursory look at how many questions you have done and speed up before it is too late. ( DO not start counting, or else that will also take up a lot of time )
After one hour do a fair assessment of where you are headed towards and make amends, by which I mean speedup if you haven’t done half the paper.
The same will apply to the CSAT Paper.
Lastly, do not get stuck at one question. If you are wasting more than 2 minutes at a certain question, you are using up the time you should have given to another question, which may have been easier.
The UPSC question comes in 4 Sets – A,B,C,D – where each set had 1 block of questions in a different order in another set.
If at first , while attempting the paper, you feel that you do not know the first 5-8 questions at all, do not despair at all. This often happens, and this has happened to me ( and I am like, a good scorer in GS Prelims )
You need to understand that you have gotten the first stack of questions from an area which you may not be very good. at. Immediately leave 15-20 questions and start from the middle of the paper. I, for example, start solving the paper backwards – that is, from No. 100.
This has happened to me, where I did not know the first 8 questions of my set. I immediately started solving from the last page and got 10 east questions – solving all of them , boosting my confidence! I was saved ( and got some 120/200 in GS )
Thats all folks. Enough of Gyan!
Best of Luck for Prelims 2015. I hope to see you through with flying colors!
See you after the Exam.
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