PYQ Analysis for GS Mains

PYQ Analysis for GS Mains

• I had done analysis of Prelims and Mains PYQs for trying to understand themes from which Questions come.( Tried to do something with Interview Transcripts too, will talk later ! ) I had uploaded the Prelims Question papers earlier. Now I am uploading the analysis I have done on GS 2 and GS 4 papers. I have divided the entire questions from 2013-2022 based on headings/themes I found relevant, hence it is different from the usual PYQ breakdown you might find. I brainstormed these questions based on this thematic manner, and after brainstorming would review whatever content I had to see if during the brainstorming I missed any relevant point. This exercise helped me immensely, and I found it to be solving the issue of me not writing Mock exams.

• P.S : I am not advocating to not write Mock Tests. I did thematic brainstorming more than mock test beacuse a) Paucity of time b) My answer presentation, time and space management during writing etc were satisfactory c) I was occasionally doing Answer writing of 2-3 questions to not loose the flow d) I had already written one Mains in 2022, before which I wrote about 7-8 Mock exams. Hence I thought to take a calculated risk of doing thematic brainstorming over writing Mock Tests.

• P.S : I did not do this division of questions for GS 1 and GS 3. Incidentally, my marks in GS 2 and GS 4 are better than my GS 1 and GS 3 - lesson being that this exercise has worked out really well for me .

• These might not look like Questions, but topics. That is intentional. It helps to understand broader themes from where questions are asked. You can see that in GS 2, areas like LSG are very important, but we often ignore this area, since it is not much significant for Prelims. The breakdown helped me prioritise areas that are more frequently asked in Mains.

• While I was brainstorming, I used to also keep with me a PYQ compilation from notias9 and searched ( Ctrl + F ) the actual question if I did not understand the question from this pdf’s ‘topics’.