Practice Sessions for UPSC Mains Answer Writing UPSC Mains Responses

To practice writing UPSC Mains responses, you must have at least a basic level of preparation and reading. Well, assuming you’ve worked through the syllabus before, here’s how you should do the UPSC mains answer writing exercise:

Most of the questions in the public service document require candidates to relate current problems to static knowledge. Therefore, it should also be practiced in a similar way. The static part and the real part do not have to be practiced separately.

First of all, don’t worry about the time. You can relax in time and focus on the quality of the answer. For a 10-point question that you have to write in 7 minutes in the thesis, it can take about 10 minutes.

There are several forums to post answers on a daily basis. IAS Baba TLP, Insights on India Secure, Forum IAS Mains Marathon, Civils daily, Just IAS are some of them. I found IAS Baba TLP to be more relevant as they ask questions about the topics and the questions are quite relevant. It’s a 60-day program that generally covers the entire stadium.

For Essay, Ethics, GS Paper 1, the questions from the previous year are the most relevant. Especially with essay topics and case studies, you should write down at least some of the questions from the previous year. Also for GS Paper 2 and Paper 3, try to review the questions from the last 2-3 years and understand the exam requirements.

The evaluation of the answers is the most important thing. There are three options here: –

Upload your answer to the website and have it evaluated. The problem here is that it is very time consuming and most of the time the assessment is done by another candidate that you don’t know and cannot trust.

Have a group of 4-5 students write the same questions and share and grade their answers. I tried it by creating a Telegram group of 5 people. The problem is that this again takes a long time. Scanning your answers, waiting for others’ comments, reading and rating others’ answers would normally take an hour couldn’t afford it.

The next day, read the model’s response on the site and rate yourself. I’ve found it to be the best as it takes the least amount of time and offers the most scope for self-improvement.

Equally important is the improvement of the answers according to the evaluation. After the evaluation, try to find out which part is missing. Lack, organization, legibility. What improvements can be made in the introduction, in the conclusion, which parts can be represented graphically. , where can bullet formatting be used and where should paragraph be used? Write these improvements down and try to incorporate them later. Try to gradually meet the time limit.7 minutes for 10 markers and 10 minutes for 15 markers.

Of course, this was done without degrading the quality of the answer.

If you are confident of writing good answers within the time limit, take part in a good test series. The purpose of the test series is to train the mind to write 20 questions continuously without tiring and within a time limit of 3 hours. Don’t rely on test suites to improve the quality of answers as the focus here is more on time management and getting the job done successfully.

Try at least once to enter the UPSC pattern, i.e., Rehearsal on Day 1, GS1 and GS2 on Day 2, GS3 and GS4 on Day 3. Forum IAS runs mocks on this line just a few days before Mains thesis for a small fee. You can use this or any other option, but try it at least once. Writing five articles in three days is a big challenge in itself.