Not Going All Guns Blazing in UPSC CSE Prelims, 2023

Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?

I appeared for the UPSC CSE PRE 2023, which sent shockwaves among the aspirant community in India.

That year, I was under the influence of Pro-Accuracy groups. It’s a group of YouTube mentors who solve the paper after the prelims to demonstrate that a significant number of questions were solvable, and came from known sources. Thus, they conclude, one should never go all out as cutoffs are dropping year after year. Basically, the idea is to take measured risks.

So I sat in the exam with this thought that I will attempt around 70-80 questions, but when I saw the paper, it was as if I had been preparing for some other exam all those years. I was disoriented. The pattern of framing MCQs, especially the options, had completely changed. I hardly knew 35 questions with certainty.

At this point, I made a blunder, which I wish I could undo.

I attempted only 54 out of 100 questions, hoping that the rest of the aspirants would also be attempting fewer questions, driving the cut off down.

The terror

Needless to say, despite clearing the CSAT cut off by a safe ~20 mark margin, I missed the GS Paper I cut off by 12 marks.

Now, why was that a blunder?

Because when I came back home, I solved the remaining 46 questions through guesswork, gut feeling and other irrational methods. I got 20 of those correct, and 26 wrong.

So had I attempted all 100, I’d have scored around 22 marks higher than the original numbers, comfortably within the safe zone.

Here are seven examples, from questions not attempted, that will haunt me for some time.

In the above question, I wanted to agree with the first statement, but I indulged in overthinking. China is a vast country, and a large agri producer. So it must be operating over a large area in absolute terms. Further, I was not sure about the percentage of fallow and uncultivated land tracts.

Lesson learnt: DON’T OVERTHINK.

In the above example, again, my gut feeling was to eliminate the first statement. But I thought 3.2% is not that high a figure. I almost chose option d but did not fill the bubble.

Here again, I chickened out because I wasn’t 100% sure about the second statement.

60% enrichment did strike me as weird, but I hadn’t covered that part in great detail. Plus, I suck at science. So I let this one go as well.

I knew Bauxite for aluminum, but these stupid infidel metals have more than one ore. My gut feeling was to go with titanium.

And these two questions!

Logically, squirrels should be omnivores. But I hadn’t seen one.

And I couldn’t imagine a luminescent mushroom, even though I couldn’t discard the idea that such a possibility did not exist.

So that’s one paper I’d like to attempt differently. Fortunately, they hold it every year, so this time it’s going to be 100 out of 100.