Importance of selecting Optional Subject for UPSC CSE

The UPSC Civil Service Examination is being conducted in 3 stages. In which the first stage is the Preliminary stage which is objective-based, the second stage is Mains which is subjective and the third is the personality test.

It is in the second stage where the aspirants have to select one optional subject and there will be two papers of 250 Marks each. Hence the weightage of the optional paper is 500 marks out of 2025 marks as per the latest pattern of UPSC Civil Services Exam that is since 2013.

The aspirants' focus should be more on Optional subject as he/she can improve the ranking in the final list by attaining more marks in the optional and because due to unpredictability associated with General Studies Papers. The Optional subject will boost the ranking of the aspirants. Hence an aspirant needs to choose the right optional subject.

The pattern has changed in 2013 there is only one optional subject rather than two. And the decision of selecting the right optional subject has always been a dilemma for Civil Services aspirants. Due to the limited time for the preparation for the examination, an aspirant must select the optional subject at the initial stage of the preparation so that the aspirant can get a sufficient amount of time for the preparation. Most of the aspirants joined in any UPSC Online Coaching platform have this common doubt of selecting the right optional subject.

Few common questions asked by the aspirants while selecting the optional subject is that whether the optional subject that should be selected should be from humanities background or science background or the aspirants ask whether the optional subject should be selected based on the graduation background or few aspirants tend to select the optional subject which the previous toppers had taken.

Hence, the important thing that an aspirant should keep in mind is that before deciding an optional subject the aspirants must go through the syllabus. The syllabus is available on the official website or any IAS Online Coaching platform. The aspirants should analyze the scoring trend of various optional subjects and then select the optional subject based on the interest of the aspirant and based on the getting maximum score in the examination as the main purpose is to clear the paper with a good score which will help in improving the rank in the final list.

The aspirants should avoid completely relying on any Online IAS Coaching platform. The aspirants can research and get guidance but should not completely rely on UPSC Online Coaching platforms due to the unpredictability of the UPSC CSE.

The aspirants should choose a subject as an Optional Subject which helps in building the curious level to learn. The aspirants should choose a subject which is interesting and not boring. Also, the aspirants should choose an Optional Subject for which the resources are easily available, or else the aspirant will be wasting half of the time in searching and collecting the materials.

One thing that an aspirant has always kept in mind is that there is no one optional subject that is suitable for all the aspirants. Each aspirant has different interests, the capability to grasp, curiosity level, etc., so to say one subject is best and has to be selected as an optional is irrelevant. It completely depends on the aspirants.