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Sunday, March 4, 2012

Analysis of Civil Service Mains - 2011 results

List of roll numbers and optionals of candidates who wrote civil services written test (Mains) in 2011.

List of candidates who passed Mains in 2011 along with their optionals, Indian language paper, center code.

Pass percentage in different optionals in Mains 2011.

List of Indian Languages and the corresponding number of students selected with these language papers.

Lion's share of 2418 candidates who are selected for interview come from Hindi heartland of India. 1496 candidates to be exact. They come from the states of Bihar, UP, MP, Haryana, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Chattisgarsh, Uttarakhand, Delhi, few from Punjab etc.

Last year, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu candidates performed extremely well grabbing disproportionately high number of seats. But this time their numbers in all likeliness will decrease as relatively less number of candidates are selected for interview. Maharashtra's performance will improve this time.

Coming to the performance of the optionals, this year UPSC didn't punish subjects and treated most of the optionals in a balanced way, evenly. Last year Psychology, History, some science optionals suffered, whatever be the reasons. Most of the candidates with Psychology optional got ridiculously low marks with few getting ridiculously high marks. Till now no body is sure about the reasons behind this. But this time that kind of surprises are limited to two optionals Management and Law. Management has 7.79 conversion rate and Law has 14.59 conversion rate. Low conversion rate with Management can be explained by taking in to account CSAT because of which non-serious MBA candidates wrote Mains.

CSAT also explains why number of candidates with optionals either History or Philosophy decreased drastically when compared with earlier years. Most of the Hindi medium junta with these optionals either failed in CSAT or didn't write it.

History and Psychology performed well this time with conversion rates over 22%. This is good news for me as one of my optionals is History. :-) Generally the conversion rates reflect the marking scheme, this year it is most likely liberal.

As usual literature optionals performed extremely well with conversion rates ranging from 25% to 100%. Overall conversion rate is 33.58% which is ridiculously high. Overall 538 got selected out of 1602. Kannada, Malayalam, Pali, Hindi, Tamil constitutes the bulk.

And as usual science subjects didn't perform well. Only silver lining is Chemistry which has seen this year its best performance since 2008 with 18.5% conversion rate. This is on par with the low level performance of Pub Ad.

Overall I am satisfied that UPSC's methods of normalization or scaling is more balancing than last year when Sociology, Geography, Pub Ad benefited and many undeserving candidates got through.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Civil Services Mains 2011 Results

Finally the wait is over. Results are declared today. In total 2418 candidates are selected. And I am one of them. :-))))

As usual, there are some genuinely deserving candidates who aren't selected. They are knowledgeable, intelligent, hard working, have good writing skills, and more importantly they did well in the exams. I can understand what may be going through in their minds now. Friends, don't give up! UPSC may be unpredictable, it may test your character, this time you may not be lucky, but persistence may pay you finally.

Going by what I see, this time more veterans got selected than freshers. That was expected, as many of the people who got selected in prelims were freshers who were not good either in GS or optionals. They got through only because of the aptitude exam newly introduced in prelims. It was natural that they would funk in Mains.

After the results are out, we can estimate which optionals have high success ratio and which have low. That can't be said now.