Prelims marksheet:
Mains Marksheet (Interview Board: Mr. RN Choubey):
Apparently the scores in optionals are slightly skewed while ethics is high scoring in CSE 2019 compared to other years. Whichever year you happen to be reading this, I would suggest not getting influenced by this too much. Don’t neglect your optional and focus only on ethics. It’s just a trend for 2019, there’s no reason it will repeat. Prepare as you would anyway.
This is a list of all the content I’ve written about UPSC CSE.
How to use a Test Series for Mains
Sociology Specific (read the Mains Strategy before you read this)
These are very useful links that will help you if you are preparing (not mine)
Prelims Guessing (AIR 19, CSE 2017 – Abhijeet Sinha)
Book-list, Prelims, GS, Essay, Interview – everything is covered here (Blog of AIR-1, 2017, Anudeep Durishetty)
A brief strategy for Mains which I used to develop my approach (Gaurav Agrawal, AIR-1, 2013)
Note-Making: By Archit Chandak (AIR 184, CSE 2017) – if you intend to make notes, refer to this.
Some Notes
I haven’t been able to put out many notes.
One reason of course is that they aren’t very useful – there are already plenty of topper’s notes there, better than mine.
And even more importantly – my notes won’t make much sense to anyone else because of the way I’ve written them.
I am adding some files here. There are some I think which are useful (mostly those I took from somewhere else, plus a couple of mine).
The others are not much use in my view. Look at them if you want, but I’d suggest not spending much time if you can’t make sense of them (it’s not your fault – I wrote them such that one or two words would help me recall everything). Other notes are very long – they’re copy-pasted from somewhere and I couldn’t bother shortening them.
This is a file with the stats / schemes I googled and used to quote in my answers to make them less generic. Just remembering a few for every topic is needed.
I feel these are somewhat useful: Essay Quotes , Articles,
Essay_Quotes: Might be Useful. List of quotes for essay – some are just quotes I liked so I put them.
GS4 Theory: Not too useful.
Articles (of Constitution) – useful for GS2, GS3 answers in Mains
Some points from 2nd ARC I picked somewhere online. Good points but too long in my opinion (did not want to make the effort of shortening). Worth skimming, focusing on important recommendations.
Sociology: 1st file might not make much sense (has some thinkers’ points). 2nd file is Indian thinkers for SOC-2. 3rd file is very useful: List of points by less known thinkers you can insert into your answers to make them sociological.
My test papers at ForumIAS: Here
Sociology Paper 1: Test papers
Sociology Paper 2: Test papers