CSAT Exam 2011
The year 2011 will herald the arrival of new format of exam for the selection of Civil Servants in India. Civil Services Exam are the most respected competitive exam in India. Despite of so much noise about the rise of IITs and IIMs the top position of this exam is intact. The exam has seen occasional reforms but still it remained an exam for rote learners who were willing to mug up important facts. Furthermore, the coaching institutes had made it much easier for aspirants by providing them concise and accurate notes on academics and General Knowledge.
This change is definitely going to have an impact on the general profile of aspirants and more and more professional graduates and candidates of urban background would get attracted to the new format of the exam. As far as village or rural students are concerned they still have the edge of hard work which can help in winning any battle of life but without doubt they will have to change their strategy.
General Studies (Paper-1) aptitude+counting+number system etc.) from the general studies but also made the message from UPSC clear that aptitude testing (CSAT) has become very important to them. There were hardly any factual questions and the paper tested an aspirant on conceptual understanding of various topics of general studies.
It would not be incorrect to say that the paper tested a candidate on General Studies Aptitude. In General Studies, each correct answer fetched two marks and for an incorrect answer, there was a penalty of 0.67 (one-third of the marks allocated to each question) for an incorrect answer.
CSAT (Paper-2) — The first CSAT paper of UPSC was replete with challenges for one and all. The paper had a heavy bias towards reading comprehension. Close to 30 questions of reading comprehension were bilingual (Hindi and English) and around 10 questions were from reading comprehensions, which were in English language only. Most of the reading comprehension questions were inferential in nature and required a thorough reading of the passage. There were 8 questions of decision-making and exactly on the same pattern.
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