Disclaimer: These are just my inferences from my experiences last year. May be all this is wrong… may be I get as bad or even worse marks than last years. No guarantees. But that is life… When obstacles come, we change course and try to steer our way around them somehow :-)
The Background
I gave my first mains in 2012. My preparation was excellent and I thought I had written all the papers reasonably well. That my preparation was not lacking can be seen from the fact that I got in 130s in prelims GS paper and since prelims I had only improved the preparation. The interview was good as well.
Yet I could secure a rank in only 200s. Everybody except me thought I would have got less marks in History since I had no background in it (took it only out of interest). Economics was my other optional. But when the final marks came, the picture turned out to be entirely different – and frankly darker for me. For it turned out that it was not history which sunk me, but GS and Essay. I had scored reasonably good marks in Economics (280s) and History (240s) and interview (210s) but failed miserably in GS (170s) and Essay (80s). GS and Essay combined took me over 80 marks below average!
I was disappointed and frustrated – for I didn’t know what went wrong in GS and Essay. And the bad news was that from 2013, weight of GS and Essay, where I had scored miserably, would become more than double while that of optional, where I had done well, would be halved. Had history been the culprit, I could have simply dropped it next time and given the exam again without doing anything extra. But it was now GS, with double marks, and I didn’t know what went wrong and what to improve – forget about how to improve. Its like being stranded in the middle of Pacific on a small boat without sails and rudder in a dark hurricane night… And yet we are expected to find the coast on the next morning!
Anyways, one thing would be clear to anybody given the above marks distribution – the main problem lay not in preparation but in answer writing. And so it had to be answer writing alone which had to be improved drastically, even at the cost of preparation.
So how to write better GS answers
So I analyzed, joined 3 test series (vision ias GS + vision ias essay + Synergy GS), wrote answers, sent them to some friends for feedback, discussed with my father and finally felt following things were important.
– GS and optionals answers are completely different. In optionals, one can write a PhD types answer and be confident of getting good marks – because the examiner who is checking an economics paper would be an economist herself. But in GS this will not work. The examiner who is checking the economics answer in a GS paper in more likelihood would not be an economist. She would be a generalist with limited knowledge and interest in the subject.
– So if you write some specialized answer or use some specific terms or models from your optional while writing a GS answer, good luck! Most probably the examiner would not understand/appreciate it. And she would not spend additional time or effort in going back and study the term/model you wrote. She would simply give a zero.
– Similarly, if you write any unconventional answers like say Aadhar cash transfers are not going to increase inflation and even give a logic based proof from basic economics, the examiner will not give any marks. Because she would have read mainstream media where everybody is saying Aadhar transfers would increase inflation. And she has no interest in taking the pain to understand a contrarian view point in your answer. Her life would be much simpler if she just gives a zero.
– So the bottom line is, our answer should be such that they make the life easier for the examiner. She would be happy while reading them and would give us more marks. So no PhD types stuff… just stick to basic points and present them in a way which is easy to read.
– Next, this exam is not a science exam. This is a generalist exam,
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