UPSC GS Paper 1 2019 Analysis- Live Now

Today UPSC conducted the Civil Services Preliminary Exam 2019 in many centres across the country. The exam happened in two parts with Paper-I being conducted in the morning and Paper-II will be conducted in the afternoon. Candidates need to clear the 66 marks cut-off in Paper-II, after which on the basis of their Paper-I scores they are selected for the mains.

This year too, UPSC lived up to its reputation among students of being the 'Unpredictable service commission'. In GS Paper-I, most of the questions were from Current Affairs [ over 50] , Geography and Environment. Traditional topics like Polity were not difficult and relatively easy. While History gave a huge surprise as many question were asked and were quite difficult. Hence breaking the previous years trend. From Economics some questions such as on Money Multiplier and Poverty Line  required applied knowledge of students. Some new types of Question are introduced from this year. Eg Sub Index of Ease of Doing Business Index. Conceptual questions were difficult as options were close to each other making guess work quite difficult. The dominance of environment based questions ebbed as this year we saw around 15 environment based questions. So, the questions were more well distributed across topics and subtopics. This played a positive role as candidates were not rewarded or punished based on his/her individual strength or weaknesses.

Broadly speaking, the level of difficulty has increased and this will have an effect on the cut-off marks as well. There could be a 2-3 points drop from 105.3 marks, which was the cut-off for Prelims 2017. However cut off would be more than cut off of 2018, which was 98.