I am a UPSC aspirant and I have started my preparation through NCERTs,...
NCERTs often form the basic study in most of the subject preparation of the UPSC examination.
Why, though?
Every country has an official version for education and our country’s is reflected through these NCERT books. So, it is an ‘official’ or ‘government-sanctioned’ book and the content of these is highly reliable.
Often books from 6th to 12th of every subject are recommended so that students from varied disciples are able to understand the basics of all the subjects.
Example: A grad student with a degree in Science wouldn’t be able to understand the advanced concepts of Polity, History or Economics. So, for them to prepare for the exam, they’ll have to understand the basics which can be done through reading the NCERT books starting from the bottom-most level i.e. 6th standard.
Now, there are two ways to study the important topics in NCERTs:
(i) Learn from the important books:
• History: Studying from Class 6 to 12 NCERTs is important as they’ll act as seeds or interlinkages that’ll help you connect the dots when you’re studying from books like Spectrum.
• Geography: Most questions for the geography portion are directly asked from the Class 11 & 12 NCERTs. Can skip reading the books from 6th to 10th if you’re good with the basics.
• Economics: Class 9 to 12 NCERTs are important if your concepts in economics are not clear, otherwise Class 12th NCERT book is important for this portion.
• Polity: The 9th and 10th NCERT books are the groundwork for this subject. You can skip those and directly study Class 11 & 12 NCERTs as the majority of the dynamic portion would be related to the topics studied in these books. Try to speed-read the topics of this section.
• Science & Tech: Class 6 to 10 NCERTs are more than enough to cover the Science and Technology syllabus. From Biology class 12 NCERT, covering the last 4 chapters is important.
While making notes for NCERTs, try to make it in the form of index based preparation, i.e. make them short and crisp without the need to include many things.
(ii) Do Selective Reading:
• You must go through the previous years’ question papers. It helps in determining the type of questions, and the areas from which more questions have been asked.
• Don’t miss the forest for the trees. NCERT isn’t ‘the’ book but rather ‘a’ book as many other books have to also be referred to complete the preparation. So, go through the summaries of NCERT books from online platforms. EduRev has well structured and detailed videos and summaries for all the subjects. You can refer to EduRev to get a gist of all the important points in any particular topic.