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TOPPER’S STRATEGY: Anu Kumari, All India Rank – 2 UPSC Civil Services Examination 2017 ( Prelims, Mains, Optional, Interview, Tips for Married women etc)

 Preliminary preparation

Standalone preparation for 2 months prior to the preliminary exam. Earlier, preparation was integrated for pre and mains together.

I did Current affairs from insightsonindia.com daily and did not make any notes from that rather revised from their monthly current affairs compilations. Daily, I solved MCQs from this site. I followed the current affairs till upto 3-4 days prior to pre exam.

For GS PAPER II (Aptitude Test), No separate preparation, my English was already okay, Maths was already prepared as I had cleared CGL (SSC) exam wherein I had revised different Maths formulae.

Test Series- I did pre related test series from InsightsonIndia. I revised the questions that I got wrong 3- 4 times. I started doing the test series in the last 2 months before pre. I did not follow any other test series. I also diligently attempted last prelims revision plan of Insights.

I had prepared an excel wherein I had made separate sheets for various reports (like ease of doing business report), another sheet for various world/regional bodies like UN, ASEAN etc, another sheet for tribes in India, another sheet for important statistics (eg our spend on education, health etc). I kept revising this excel for pre, mains and some bits for interview too. It came especially handy for Pre.

Advice- Please pick any one website, don’t get carried away by multitude of information available on different websites. Important thing is to revise, I made sure that I revised all standard books including NCERTs multiple times (4-5 times). Similarly, I revised current affairs and test series multiple times.

Mains strategy

To start mains answer writing, first cover all basic books and then practice answer writing. I had attempted Secure initiative on insightsonindia.com for 4-5 months at a stretch (from Aug 16 to Jan 17), wrote 7-8 answers daily on register and then compared them with other answers written on insightsonindia.com. This, I had done before preliminary itself during the course of integrated preparation for Mains and pre.

After pre, I prepared notes from current affairs (very short notes for quick revision) in soft copy paper-wise (like GS-1,2,3 and 4 separately). Revised standard books multiple times again what I had done during preliminary. I practised answer writing for GS papers by writing 7-8 tests (at home only and then compared them with model answers as given in various test series). I sometimes asked my friends to evaluate my copies.

Some tips to enrich your answers in mains –

  • Substantiate with statistics and current affairs 
  • Use names of expert committees to suggest solutions
  • Use diagrams to the extent possible
  • Answer on multiple dimensions (social, political, economic, cultural etc)
  • Use quotes (to the extent possible, even in GS 1,2,3 papers) 
  • Do underline to highlight important stuff

For GS 4 ie Ethics, collected good quotes by Swami Vivekanand, Gandhi, Einstein, Mandela etc, made them my laptop wallpapaers. I put syllabus in front of me and ensured that I have understood n covered each and every topic, especially the definition of each and every word written there.

I reflected back on my entire life and made notes of the good things and the bad things that I had done in life and tried to use real life examples in my answers. (eg- a real life example of moral dilemma is when your friend is cheating in exams and copying from you- on the one hand, it helps my friend improve her marks, on the other hand, this is morally wrong) This exercise was a good self reflection exercise too that helped my understand myself better.

I consulted the book G Subbarao and did all concepts from the book and solved several case studies from that.

Advice– Please do not ignore this paper. With less preparation, it can give you an edge over others. Prepare examples of various situations in advance like conflict of interest, moral dilemma etc so that they can be quoted in exam. Learn names of important people with integrity like S Manjunath etc too