What are the strategies that you would like to recommend to a beginner for the UPSC Prelims?

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Accepted Answer

1. Start early: Prelims require dedicated preparation of 3-4 months these days. So you must start early on in order to get adequate momentum right before the actual date of Prelims. Starting early will also help you avoid the anxiety that builds when the exam date gets nearer since you'll be done with a major chunk of your preparation well in advance.

2. Be innovative in your approach: When the competition is so high and everyone is trying their best, you need to be innovative in order to stand out from the crowd. Use memory and revision techniques such as ANKI, spaced revision and active recall. You can study in groups or use new note-taking styles.

3. Revise till you're tired: No amount of revision is too much revision. So keep revising until most things of the material you're referring to are etched in your mind. To enhance the quality of your revision, ensure that you have short and concise notes ready.

4. Quiz yourself or your friends: Quizzing is a great method for Prelims preparation. Since we only have to recognize the correct answer and not to exactly recall it, a good set of quiz questions can help in making this recognition process more convenient for you.

5. Two Current Affairs Sources: You can have two current affairs sources if you wish to have since a lot of times one current affairs source might miss out on important news or event. By increasing the breadth of your Current affairs coverage, you'd also be able to reduce the uncertainty involved with the topics coming into the Prelims paper.

6. Test Series: Several coaching institutes are working day and night to predict questions that might appear in the UPSC Prelims. While a lot of their predictions can and will go wrong, some of them will definitely make their way into the actual Prelims paper directly or indirectly. Use Test Series Questions to widen your knowledge base, as well as to finalise a personalised strategy for you.

7. Linking Current Affairs to the Static: Since the UPSC Prelims of 2017, it is getting more and more difficult to categorize any question as purely current affairs-based or purely static. Current affairs and static information are now more intertwined than ever and hence it's important that you too while reading and revising anything, try to make these inter-linkages between the static books and the newspaper material relevant for Prelims.

8. Using Previous Year Questions: The Previous Year Question (PYQs) Papers to any examination are a way to the mind of the paper-setter. Use the Previous Year Question papers available on the UPSC website to understand the demands of the Prelims examination and also to understand the evolving pattern. Prelims pattern is on a continuous evolution and anyone who follows the PYQs diligently always gets an edge on D-Day.

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