Ethics and Essay
Dear Students
- What scares you the most about civil services preparation?
- What makes you stressed about the Main examination?
- Which subjects give you sleepless nights?
Well, we know that for a majority of you, Essay and Ethics, the innocuous-looking papers are the most troubling, isn’t it? After all, the papers appear to be in your reach, with the concepts of Ethics being quite familiar and the notion of the essay being a license to pour your ideas freely on the answer booklet. However, Ethics and Essay aren’t about filling the pages of your answer booklet. They require a nuanced understanding of a range of issues and a lot of practice to excel. If you ignore these aspects, your preparation bandwagon will get derailed easily.
Let us delve into statistics a bit. You must be aware of the concept of standard deviation. It measures the dispersion of a dataset relative to its mean. If the marks scored by the UPSC aspirants in Essay and Ethics papers from this set, you will find that a lot of candidates are located far away from the mean. For example, if the average number of marks scored in the Ethics paper is 95, you will find students having scores as low as 50 and as high as 135. The same goes with the Essay. It simply means you have high chances of sabotaging your papers as well as coming out with flying colors, depending upon the path you choose.
The path you choose is important indeed. Imagine scoring a 95 rather than a 130 in Essay – your chances of qualifying the Mains stage goes for a toss. On the other hand, imagine scoring a 120, a couple of notch above the mean of 95 – you will end up getting the service or cadre of your choice. The point we are trying to make here is that the stakes are really high in Essay and Ethics. You simply can’t afford to perform badly or below average in these two papers, simply because you don’t have the luxury to make up for your low scores elsewhere. The 3 GS papers don’t give you the room to increase your score beyond a threshold. Therefore, you NEED to invest your time and energy in Essay and Ethics.
We are Organising an Open Session on Ethics and Essay for all the students writing Mains this year. Sunil Oberoi sir, who has helped many students to improve their scores in these papers will be taking these sessions. The sessions will be an eye-opener on Ethics and Essay papers and also will help you to propel your marks.
Open Session In Bengaluru - 26 & 27 June @ 3 PM
Sunil Oberoi Sir (Retd. IAS)
Sunil Oberoi Sir has worked on Civil Services Reforms in India with UNDP and DoPT. He was a government nominee in interview boards and Examiner in various govt. exams. He was also associated with induction training of new entrants of Civil Services and In-Service training of Senior Civil Servants.
