The candidates need to clear the Paper-2, in which minimum 66 marks are required to be scored, after which on the basis of their Paper-1 scores they will be selected for the mains. The UPSC 2018 mains exam will be held on October 28.
UPSC lived up to its reputation among students of being the ‘Unpredictable service commission’. In GS Paper-1, the areas from which questions are usually asked was different for many questions.
Aditya Jagtap, mentor, Career Launcher, said,”Traditional topics like polity, which were asked conceptually in 2017, were this time around asked with a much different focus in mind. Some questions such as the one on National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) also tested allied knowledge of students. Conceptual questions types too saw an innovation in the form of a paragraph based question on Internet-of-things. The dominance of environment based questions ebbed as this year we saw around 14 environment based questions, the same as a polity, which stood at 24! So, the questions were better distributed across topics and subtopics this time around. This played a positive role as candidates were not rewarded or punished based on his/her individual strength or weaknesses”.
In GS Paper-2 there were several changes. Candidates are expected to clear this hump before their scores in Paper-1 are checked and some who went in fully unprepared were in for a surprise.
Jagtap analysed,”There were no Verbal Logic questions and only 26 Reading Comprehension based questions were asked. Data interpretation and Analytical Reasoning had 11 questions each. Those candidates who could use question selection strategies could significantly ease the solving process”.