On July 30, thousands of aspirants gathered at Jantar Mantar to protest against the unfair UPSC CSAT 2023. One of the demands of the students is to drop 25 questions from the exam which they alleged was out of the syllabus. The aggrieved candidates also provided instances where UPSC dropped a few questions from the 2020 GS paper. Further, in the 2021 UPSC CSE prelims exam, one question of GS paper 1 was removed from Set A.
“This year’s CSAT was more difficult than previous years. Math questions in CSAT were of CAT level. We have students with us from science and IIT backgrounds who found the exam tough.” lead petitioner Ayushi said.
In one of his interviews, Drishti IAS founder Vikas Divyakirti acknowledged that the 2023 UPSC CSE prelims exam was one of the most difficult exams conducted by the commission. He further said the “commission focused on factual information” more than conceptual details. Moreover, Divyakirti claims in the interview that UPSC has increased math questions in the CSAT paper which students from “BTech and IIT background found difficult” to solve and hence were unable to crack the prelims.
Also Read: UPSC CSAT 2023: ‘Demand for Re-exam Not Practically Feasible,’ 33% is Standard Passing Marks, Say Experts
Several aspirants have also claimed UPSC CSAT favours those from mathematical backgrounds. “The CSAT paper is not solely about mathematics, it also includes reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and data interpretation. These areas do not necessarily require specific formulas to achieve the 33 per cent mark,” Rewari said.
Srirangam Sriram, founder of SRIRAM’s IAS believes it is a genuine concern for humanities background students. “However, CSAT has a lot of mathematics and that should be of class 10th level so that candidates can sharpen themselves but it is turning out to be a nightmare for non-maths students. Something has to be done about it as lakhs of people are demanding. Otherwise, it is like you are preferring engineering students from the backdoor,” he adds.
Divyakirti in the interview recommended, “Prelims is a screening test. If you increase the difficulty level of the questions then many brilliant minds will not clear. UPSC is also making those questions tougher which do not have much link to the career. A basic level of data interpretation, efficiency, math, ratio proportion, and statistics is a must for the students to know. But if you are asking questions from calculus which has hardly any link from the career, I think there is an understanding issue from the examiner’s end, that may get corrected in next year’s exam.”
Concerns regarding General Studies (GS) paper 1 of UPSC- CSE 2023 were also raised, wherein students claimed some questions were of certain specific patterns and lacked specificity as well as objectivity. “UPSC should at least stick to the exam pattern it is following for many years. Further, the correct answer key should be released immediately after the results and we should have a chance to raise objections,” said Raju Kumar from Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar.
“We can go on complaining about the questions in general studies. I find nothing complainable about general studies. It is a wonderful paper that covers lovely questions on constitutions, political systems and economic systems, cultural environment, and so on. Some questions are bound to be tough but the more we study, the more we can. The cut-off is 90 which means you need only 45 to be right and if including negative markings, if you could attempt 60, intelligently you can still make it so, I find this objection unsustainable,” said the founder of the SRIRAM’s IAS.
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