UPSC Civil Services Preliminary Exam 2018 Analysis: Drop in cut-offs expected, say expert

UPSC CSE exam 2018: The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) Civil Services Preliminary exam 2018 was held across the country on Sunday, June 3, 2018. There were two papers – Paper-I being conducted in the morning and Paper-II conducted in the afternoon.

According to Aditya Jagtap, a mentor at Career Launcher, “Candidates need to clear the 66 marks cut-off in Paper-II, after which on the basis of their Paper-I scores they are selected for the mains.”

“Broadly speaking, the level of difficulty has increased and this will have an effect on the cut-off marks as well. There could be a 2-3 points drop from 105.3 marks, which was the cut-off for Prelims 2017, but it is difficult to say as there are some questions in Paper-I where many answer keys could be wrong,” said the mentor.

“This year too, UPSC lived up to its reputation among students of being the 'Unpredictable service commission'. In GS Paper-I, the areas from which questions are usually asked was different for many questions. Traditional topics like polity, which were asked conceptually in 2017, were this 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 polity, which stood at 24! So, the questions were more well 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,” said Jagtap.

“There were several changes in GS Paper-II. Candidates are expected to clear this hump before their scores in Paper-I are checked and some who went in fully unprepared were in for a surprise. 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,” he added.