BANGALORE: The candidates who appeared for the Civil Services Examinations (Prelims) conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) were pleased with their performance on Sunday. Paper II, the Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT) introduced for the first time, had questions on English language, mathematical reasoning, analytical ability and interpersonal skills.T S Arvind, 25, said, “The CSAT paper tested the mental aptitude of the candidates.None of the questions were out of the syllabus.Coaching helped me in the logical reasoning, though the paper was time consuming.” The General Studies paper (Paper I) had too many environmental questions based on current affairs, he said.Navjet Singh, 27, said that the second paper was really good. A lot of candidates thought there was number crunching and had prepared on the lines of GMAT. In Paper II, there were eight decision making questions that carried no negative marking.These questions were based on situations that one has faced and can face in the future, he said.“I anticipated the question paper to be difficult, but it was easy,” said Shwetha K N.Similar thoughts were echoed by Mahendraprabhu on second paper.According to Career Launcher team, UPSC surprised many when it came up with the decision that it will do away with optional subjects and will introduce a separate paper of aptitude testing in the preliminary examination. First, the number of questions in the General Studies was reduced from 150 to 100. Second, the CSAT paper was heavily biased towards reading comprehension.General Studies (Paper I)In General Studies, each correct answer fetched two marks and for an incorrect answer, there was a penalty of 0.67 marks (One-third of the marks allocated to each question) .In terms of distribution, maximum questions were from Science and Technology (21) closely followed by Economics (20) and Geography (18) respectively. Going by the level of the paper, one can infer that a net score of 80 marks should be required to clear the paper, the experts observed.CSAT (Paper II)The first CSAT paper of UPSC was replete with challenges for one and all. The paper had a heavy bias towards reading comprehension.Close to 30 questions of reading comprehension were bilingual (Hindi and English) and around 10 questions were from reading comprehension, which were in English only. There were eight questions of decisionmaking.Given the difficulty of the papers, one can safely assume that a score of 180 (80 in General Studies and 100- 110 in CSAT) marks out of 400 should ensure a call for the main examination.
Comments
0 comment