UPSC Civil Services (Prelims) 2023: Elimination of elimination method; a new order or just a blip?

What is the elimination method technique for solving exams?

The UPSC Civil Services Prelims examination is an objective type paper where each question is accompanied by four options and the appearing candidate has to find the right answer from the four options. 

In the preliminary examination, most of the options are very close to the correct answer and hence the aspirants use the elimination method to get to the right answer. This technique involves systematically eliminating the options that are clearly incorrect, thereby increasing the chances of selecting the correct answer. 

What was different this year? 

To understand this, let’s look at one of the questions this year. 

In this question, option d is the correct answer.

In the traditional pattern, UPSC would have presented the options as

a)  Option 2 and 3 correct

b) Option 3 is correct

c) 1, 2 and 3 correct

d) None of these

However, to conclude an answer the candidate is required to know all the three matches mentioned in detail. If the candidate is unsure about even one option they cannot use the elimination method since the option only asks them to find out the number of correct pairs rather than giving them the option of correct and incorrect pairs.

The paper saw many questions following the same answer.

Sarmad Mehraj, the UPSC teacher at BYJU’S, claims that the aspirants need to be sure of all the statements so as to attempt the questions based on such a pattern.

“Earlier, elimination techniques would help when an aspirant was sure of two statements out of four. With this pattern, a thorough study of the entire syllabus is required. The commission laid too much emphasis on facts that ideally aspirants would skip. The cut-off is likely to be less this year,” Mehraj said.

Abhishek Kumar, a UPSC aspirant who qualified prelims this year, said that the pattern change was unforeseen and will give a break to students from blindly following coaching institutes. 

“I have attended coachings at Rajendra Nagar and their main focus is to train a candidate in applying elimination method to solve questions. They mainly focus on prelims preparation rather than the overall exam. This is why I quit coaching and prepared through self-study. I was mainly focused on mains preparation which needs extensive study. This helped in cracking the exam,” he shared.

Is this a permanent pattern change?

Experts are divided on this thought. While some agree that a change can be observed in the redundancy of the elimination method used to solve prelims, others believe that the unpredictability of this very exam gives little space for anything certain.

Sriram Srirangam, founder and director of Sriram’s IAS, said that aspirants should see this as a change and prepare for the 2024 prelims accordingly.

“This year there is a relatively significant change that caught the aspirants surprised, and some, napping. It is the change made in the elimination technique. Should one lose sleep over it? We need to see if this is the new order or just a blip. For the 2024 Preliminaries, however, the candidate is best advised to treat this as a trend and be ready,” Srirangam said. 

Meanwhile, Pranay Aggarwal, an educator at IAS Gurukul, cautions aspirants to not take this exam as a general pattern. 

“Questions in the GS paper were also a significant break from the past. Therefore, it reinforces the image of UPSC, as many students call it, the Unpredictable Public Service Commission. However, students must understand that one year does not make a pattern. So, from next year onwards similar difficulty levels may not appear,” Aggarwal said. 

Shreeja C, a UPSC aspirant who has been appearing for the last four years, failed to qualify this year too. “I am disappointed with the constantly changing trends of UPSC. The syllabus itself is so vast that we cannot cover every aspect in detail. The unpredictability is so high with this exam that at this stage I am clueless if I should even continue my preparation. There has to be some standards set in terms of exam pattern, the syllabus is anyways endless,” Shreeja said.