Sample of some of my notes and my strategy and thought process around them.

Going to share the sample of some of my notes and my strategy and thought process around them.

After this message you would find a string of PDFs. These are samples only and I urge you to make your own notes. If you can’t wrap your head around my notes/strategy, please do not waste your time on them and find something that clicks for you. There are n number of ways to clear this exam, this happens to be the way that worked for me.

The purpose of sharing sample notes to begin with was to familiarise you with my thought process. Samples would force you to make your own notes, which trust me when I say this, is the way to go (even if you don’t follow my strategy).

Making someone else’s resources and strategy “your own” is extremely crucial.

These are some of the sample graphs/diagrams that I kept handy. The aim was to use them to fill up spaces if I could not come up with enough points.

1. Filling up spaces to make your answer sheet appear “fuller” is something that I feel has some psychological sense to it (for the checker). But at the same time, we must make sure to keep our answers’ presentation neat. Do not insert diagrams anywhere just to use them.

2. This is a methodology that I followed for a brief while. It entails brainstorming on letters of alphabets to generate points/vocab which I can use in almost any question. Though it got a bit hectic after a while and so I left the process midway. But this is one approach which you can use to brainstorm points/filler content.

3. Pretty straightforward. Try to arrange your facts thematically. And as and when found, keep adding catchy phrases you find under the respective subheadings.

4. This is how I had made notes for the 200 topics that I prepared for mains. Notice the crispness and the compactness of the notes. Making them this way ensured that I could go over these 200 topics (hardly 20 pages) multiple times and revisit them even during the breaks that we get between papers.

5. On a similar pattern, this is how I had shortened my class notes to ensure I could revise them multiple times. I had boiled down 250 odd pages of class notes (of one topic, say polity) into 7-8 pages. And I had done so for all major topics. Doing this will require a thorough understanding of your own notes. You will know what to include in these super crispy notes only if you’ve gone through your source notes multiple times. Again, remember the cardinal rule (that you’ve probably heard more than your own name during your preparation) - Revision is the key. All of this ensured multiple rounds of efficient revisions.

6. I had made a document with Articles that I encountered throughout my preparation. Arranging them neatly in an ascending order (and doing this exercise on my own) helped me remember and understand them better.

7. Quotes. Keep collecting them. In the end, make a final document theme wise and select 2-3 quotes for each of the themes from your main source quote notes.

8. Very very important. Enriching your “vocab” and how you present your thoughts is EXTREMELY CRUCIAL. Mains is all about how elegantly you can present your thoughts. Strive to keep enriching your repertoire of “words and phrases” through which you can express yourself better. While reading newspapers, pay attention to not only understanding the issues but also to how they make you understand. If you come across an article that felt a breeze to read, take a pause and analyze why it was so. Why was it more enjoyable than other articles? Pick up words and statements you like and consciously inject them in your answers.

Also, I am not saying to use flowery words. Not at all. Simplicity is the key. Use words that we have no problem understanding but somehow slip our attention when we are writing answers.

9.Make a list of important committees. Go a step further and see what they have actually recommended. Use their recommendations in your answers.