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May 19, 2021

How to prepare for UPSC

 UPSC conducts the Civil Services Examination (CSE) to recruit IAS, IPS, IFS, and other officers for allied services. Lakhs of aspirants apply for the exam, yet only a few qualify the exam. So, what is that which brings about the difference, you ask!

Well, it's the preparation strategy! Most aspirants wonder, "How to prepare for UPSC" or "How to prepare for UPSC to qualify the exam in the first attempt" or “How to prepare for IAS Exam”! In this article, we have tried to answer this question in an extremely comprehensive way.

Stages of UPSC Exam:

As you may already know, the UPSC Civil Services examination has three stages, namely, Prelims, Mains, and Interview. The first step is the Preliminary Examination. Hence, in this article, we will begin by answering How to prepare for IAS Prelims effectively!

UPSC Prelims:

The UPSC Civil Services Prelims consists of two exams namely General Studies-I and General Studies-II (CSAT).

In the preparation strategy for the Civil Services Prelims examination, the General Studies portion is always considered to be the trickiest to crack because of its perceived complexity. Moreover, since the UPSC cutoff is determined based on the score in the General Studies paper, it is an extremely important paper.

Before preparing for any exam, it is important to know the nitty-gritty of the exam well enough. Read through the notification of the UPSC exam carefully in order to acquaint yourself with the exam syllabus, exam pattern, exam timeline, and eligibility criteria. Once you’re through that, pick up the previous year papers and skim through them to get an understanding of what is actually asked in the exam. 

If you give dedicated amount of time to do this exercise, you will save a considerable amount of time through your preparation journey! Alternatively, you can glance through the articles on our website to get comprehensive information about what the exam is! At this time, you should also start reading the newspaper. Check this article to understand how to read newspapers for UPSC!

No matter what your background is, you need to understand the basics of the core subjects of the UPSC syllabus.

Hence, refer to NCERTs, they can be downloaded from the official website of NCERT for free. Read them at least twice before making notes, and then read our NCERT compilations. You can get the NCERT compilations on our Telegram Forum (cl_civils) for free. Prepare your notes alongside these compilations in order to save time! Check out which NCERTs you need to refer to from here.

Once you have read all the NCERTs, it’s time to expand your knowledge by reading the standard books. You can get the entire booklist for UPSC preparation in the linked article. Read the books at least twice and then make your handwritten notes to be used for answer-writing practice at the later stage! You can also watch video lectures on our YouTube channel for important topics to supplement your knowledge.