CSAT Paper 2 Analysis by Dr.Mansoor Ali Saga

CSAT Paper 2 - 2014 - Analysis
The CSAT Paper 2 2014 was easy and along
expected lines. But great tests have to meet
other parameters as well. For one, they need to
unsettle a prepared student by springing a few
surprises - No, not shocks , just surprises. So
that if a normal hard working and even smart
working student goes for the exam with some
preconceived notions, then the notions need to
shattered by the exam not looking like the one
they had imagined. That's what separates a
really intelligent student from someone who is
trying to be one. An intelligent student would
browse the whole paper for about 5 minutes to
check what's present and how much of each
topic is represented and then strategize.
Considering that the removal of 6 questions of
ELCS had already been announced, the complete
absence of Decision Making questions unsettled
a lot of students. While preparing through Mock/
Simulated Tests, many students had fine-tuned
their strategy for the exam. As, Decision Making
questions are easy to score in and less time
consuming, so many students had decided to
sequentially start with Decision Making and then
move on to difficult and more time consuming
subjects. Third change in the paper was the
increased length of some of the Comprehension
passages, which scared off a lot of students.
Fourth change was the evidence of new found
love of UPSC for Environment and Ecology as a
topic for Comprehension passages. A quick
browsing in five minutes of the whole paper to
get comfortable with the structure of the paper
was definitely required. A greater number of
Analytical Ability, which is time consuming
meant that students did not have the time to
attempt many questions and complained about
time shortage to complete the paper. Moreover
longer comprehension passage also contributed
to shortage of time.
Now let's look at individual subjects :
1. Comprehension - The topic with the greatest
weightage in the exam normally has 24 to 32
questions. This year 26 questions came.
Normally the length of passages is 114 to 282
words but this year some passages were 567
words long. Normally the social sciences and
Indian history and context are the frequent topics
of passages but this year most of the passages
were from Environment and Ecology. The type of
questions were as easy as those of previous
years but any student who used previous
knowledge or their own opinions definitely would
get some tricky questions wrong. I will discuss
these tricky questions in the explanation that
follows.
2. Logical Reasoning and Analytical Ability - This
topic is usually the forte of Engineers and
Science students and normally had 7 to 15
questions but this year it had 18 questions.
Presence of 12 Analytical Ability questions meant
that students had less time as Analytical Ability
questions take more time and if you get stuck on
an Analytical Ability question, you can waste too
much of time. Analytical Ability questions were
not very difficult but when a super easy
Analytical Ability question (A is taller than B)
came and students solve it in half a minute, they
just couldn't believe their luck and tried to find
out if they had made a silly mistake somewhere
and so actually spent the greatest time in
checking where they had gone wrong.
Logical Reasoning sprung its own surprises.
Normally 4 questions based on Deductive Logic
or Unobjectionable Conclusion comes in Logical
Reasoning. But like in the 2012 paper, this year
we had 6 questions based on Critical Reasoning.
Yes, the Assumption, Strengthening, Weakening,
and Inference family of questions. All you had to
do in this year's questions was to pick up an In
Scope, 100% according to the given information
and Unobjectionable answer. You had to avoid
using previous knowledge, your own judgment
and the heavily make up wala cute looking traps.
3. Decision Making and Problem Solving with its
normal 6 to 8 questions did an invisible act, and
all students missed it badly and searched several
times to find where these nice questions were
located in the paper. This missed up previously
honed strategies. Let's not cry over them.
4. General Mental Ability, which normally has 6
to 16 questions and a lot of interdisciplinary
questions with Basic Numeracy, had 9 questions.
All questions were easy and most questions
were from Spatial Non-Verbal Reasoning. I have
not included questions of Sets in GMA as I
normally categorise them under Basic Numeracy
as all questions of Sets can done through Basic
Numeracy but only a few can be done with GMA
skills.
5. Basic Numeracy & Data Interpretation -
Instead of the expected 20 to 23 questions , this
year's paper had 15 questions of Basic
Numeracy and 6 questions of Data Interpretation.
The questions of both were easy, less formula
driven and less calculation intensive, but they
also had twists inside them. These twists in
questions needed a certain sense of Math which
is lacking in students who may have worked
hard on Math but still have an aversion for Math.
The questions could have been solved without
knowledge of formulas, but knowing some high
level arcane stuff like Arithmetic Progression
would have made life easier. So students had
opposite views- some thought the paper had too
difficult Math while others found the same
questions a cakewalk.
When I looked at the changes made by UPSC in
its IAS Exam pattern, in September 2010, I
actually had very little faith that UPSC would
have the talent or the wherewithal to do justice
to its intentions of transforming the IAS Prelims
so that it could filter out most of dumbos with
great mugging up skills. Mr. V.P. Gupta, Director
of Rau's IAS Study Circle, very cogently
convinced me to prepare a test prep product for
CSAT Paper 2. Over the last few years, my faith
in the testing pattern used by UPSC had only
increased. But there was one lingering doubt -
all great aptitude tests have to be as un-tutor-
able as possible. And although, I read something
about efforts to make the IAS exam more un-
tutor-able, I had really not seen any effort in this
direction. So UPSC, this year, finally crossed the
Rubicon.
Learn from mistakes you made in strategizing on
Prelims Papers , so that you dont make mistakes
on the Mains.