CSP 2013 Analysis

The Prelims Paper I for the UPSC Exam 2013 was held from 9:30 to 11:30am on Sunday,
26th May, 2013. The paper did not throw up any major surprise. As far as the difficulty level
of the questions is concerned, the paper was along expected lines. A major point to note is
that the paper was fairly balanced, featuring about 20 questions from each of the major
topics- History, Indian Polity, Indian Economy, Geography and Science and Technology.
The fallout of this is that unless the candidates were well versed with each of these topics
they stand to lose. This is one of the factors that could be said to have raised the level of
difficulty of the paper.
Another feature to note is that the questions were quite lengthy in their content and thus
required more time to read. This can be understood from the fact that the 100 questions in
the paper were spread over 21 sheets, averaging less than 5 questions per sheet. There
were 55 questions in the paper that required candidates to check multiple combinations of
statements to arrive at the correct answer. These questions took more time and effort to
solve, and were prone to errors.
The topic wise break up of the questions in Paper I is as follows:

Topic
History and Culture
Polity
Geography and Ecology
Science
Economy

Number of questions
15
19
27
21
18

Difficulty Level
Easy
Moderate
Moderate to Difficult
Moderate to Difficult
Moderate

A score of 85 to 95 in this section can be considered a good one.

Paper II of the UPSC Prelims Exam CSAT was held from 2:30 to 4:30pm. The overall
difficulty level of the paper was similar to that of past years. The most noticeable change
was that there was a substantial increase in the number of questions from Quantitative
Aptitude. This increase in questions was partly set off by a significant DECREASE IN THE
NUMBER OF Reading Comprehension questions from 40 last year to 23 this year. The
Reading Comprehension passages, though easy, were slightly lengthy this time around.
Also, the number of questions asked from individual passages varied from 2 to 5.
The three passages from English Language Comprehension had 8 questions asked from
them. All these questions were very basic in nature and could have been answered after a
single reading of the passage. The number of questions from Decision Making came down
to 6 as compared to 7 last year, and these were not very difficult to manage.
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Topic
Reading Comprehension
English Passages
Data Interpretation
Quantitative Ability
General Mental Ability
Analytical Reasoning
Decision Making

Number of questions
23
8
6
12
7
18
6

Difficulty Level
Moderate
Easy
Easy-Moderate
Easy-Moderate
Moderate
Easy-Moderate
Moderate

A score of 135 to 145 in this section can be considered a good one.

The likely category wise cut offs for CSP 2013are as follows:
Category
General
OBC
SC
ST

Score
220 230
200 210
195 205
192 201

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Total Score
400
400
400
400