Heavy dose of current affairs with focus on Union Government’s pet schemes surprised the Civil Services aspirants this year with the traditional areas of Geography, History and Polity seemingly ignored.
The aspirants were stumped by the unpredictability of the questions in the preliminary examination held on Sunday, and they feel it lacked the necessary balance to accommodate areas that majority aspirants focus on.
The paper on General Awareness normally comprises questions on a wide range of areas listed in the syllabus like Current events, History of India, world Geography, Indian Polity and Governance, Economic and Social Development, Environmental Ecology and General science. But nearly 50 per cent of questions were on current affairs that had an overarching emphasis on Central Government schemes.
Gopala Krishna, Director of Brain Tree in Hyderabad said that UPSC had lived up to its proverbial label of being an Unpredictable Public Service Commission. “It has an unenviable task of reducing the aspirants to a manageable number. With over 11.36 lakh applicants for 1079 vacancies, the examiner has no choice but to design the distribution and the composition of the paper in the most unpredictable manner,” he felt agreeing that the aspirants were taken by surprise. P. Rambabu, Director of La Excellence agreed that unpredictability was not new in UPSC and similar pattern was seen last year itself. Trainers who analysed the paper said that Current Affairs had 33 questions of which 18 were on international current affairs while General Knowledge has 18 questions with 9 questions each from Government schemes and on related Government organisations. Economics with 17, Environment with 16 and History with 15 questions also took a major share. Aspirants were also surprised with 8 questions in Technology.
“It is an unbalanced paper,” said Nilesh, an aspirant. He had prepared thoroughly from NCERT books but A few questions from expected areas like Geography and Polity hit is plans. “It had an overdose of questions on Modi’s pet schemes, said Arvind, who was taking the examination for the third consecutive year. But he was well prepared as he focussed lot on current affairs.
The unexpected pattern has hurt several aspirants, more so those who are good at aptitude and reasoning as the marks from the aptitude paper would not be considered for determining merit. Aptitude is just a qualifying paper now while marks for merit would be considered from the general awareness paper. Meanwhile, only 37,521 of the 99,555 aspirants who had applied for the examination from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh appeared at the preliminary examination. The exam was held at six centres in AP and Telangana – Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Anantapur, Tirupati and Warangal.
