What is the harsh reality that every aspirant should know before starting preparation for the UPSC exam - pravinnath/upscpreparationguide GitHub Wiki

That no matter how hard you try, you might still not make it to the final list.

This is one of the most brutal exams in the world. There are simply so many variables at play, many of them outside your control.

The best you can do is to prepare with all your heart and effort, but there will still be things that CAN and WILL bring you down.

Let’s look at statistics:

For every 15 thousand students selected for Mains, there are about 3 lakh 85 thousand who don’t make it (If we take 4 lakh total aspirants)

For every 2500 out of 15 thousand upsc/ias aspirants selected for Interview there are 12,500 who don’t make it.

For every 1000 aspirants selected in the final list, there are still 1500 who don’t make it.

how can i prepare for ias

upsc online mock test

ncert economics book

You see the picture? There is so much arbitrariness, so much funnelling of the talent that it is very easy to be left out at any stage despite having prepared for all the might you have. This is one exam in which the effort put in is not directly proportional to the results thus making it very very different from IIT JEE or CAT for example (and that’s why many IITians and IIM grads continue to languish in the course of preparation of this exam, most of them never making it)

You can control what you can control: putting in the efforts. But there will always be things you can’t do anything about: you get a difficult paper, you prepare static more and the paper asks current affairs, you misinterpret one essay in the exam hall, you get a tough board or it was simply not your day. This exam is unlike other exams where you solve a certain no of questions and you can be sure of getting certain marks. Here you write an answer to the best of your knwledge but still get single digit marks. There have been instances when a person who scored 180 in the previous year not being able to touch even triple digits in the subsequent year. There have been instances when a person who got very good marks by one interview board and was literally butchered by another the very next year. Did he deteriorate so much during the course of the year? The subjectivity especially at the Mains and Interviews has been the bane of many a candidate, many of whom don’t even know what went wrong till today. All they could do was to make peace with their results and move on in life.

essay for civil services

ias history optional books

history notes for ias

Also stay away from those selected candidates who preach that they knew beforehand that they will get selected. Most of them didn’t even know whether they will clear pre.