Challenges faced by UPSC Aspirants in Preparing for the Exam

For clearing the UPSC exam, one has to dedicate a lot of quality time and effort to be able to grasp the mammoth syllabus. Months are spent just to touch the tip of the iceberg for each subject’s syllabus. Most often than not people get demotivated by the factors involved in the preparation. Multiple attempts and revisions can be a daunting task during which an aspirant might lose interest and choose a different career pathway. Loosing so many crucial years of life to UPSC exam preparation posses a lot of future challenges in a candidate’s life. The struggle does not lie only while preparing for UPSC but also after that if the candidate fails to achieve fruitful results.

It is critical to understand the problems faced by an aspiring candidate to become a civil servant and serve in the country’s highest administrative services. Let’s see what are the common challenges faced during UPSC preparation and what can a candidate do about those:

1. How to get started

It is not easy for a person to understand the pattern and marking scheme of the various papers involved in the UPSC exam. One can be torn between various subjects and topics. It is not a child’s play to tackle simultaneous preparation of so many subjects involved in the exam. The question of where and how to get started haunts most of the aspirants for a long time until they find a plausible answer.
Well, we may just have the right resources to get you started: UPSC Resources

2. Number of Papers to clear

The UPSC exam pattern is divided into two phases - Prelims and mains. These phases have different qualifying and cut off based exams of different subjects. Preparing well for all the subjects and cracking all the exams in a limited time period is only possible with extremely high levels of dedication and hard work. To prepare, first one needs to know what’s in store; and to help you with that, we have listed out the complete UPSC Exam Pattern for you at one place - UPSC Exam Format.

3. Mammoth Syllabus

With recommendations from so many online and offline UPSC coaching institutions/platforms, one can be overwhelmed by the syllabus. The candidate needs to have thorough preparation of the whole UPSC exam syllabus to land a job. You can prepare well if you have all these in front of you at the click of a button. You can refer to these whenever in doubt or whenever you’re planning your study time: UPSC Exam Syllabus.

4. Unavailability of smaller unit mock tests

There are hardly any mock tests available as per the topics and subjects. An aspirant simply covers the syllabus without analysing their strengths and weaknesses they hold over the subject. Smaller units of practice tests help in gauging the candidate’s knowledge, however, these are hardly available. With SprintUPSC, you can do all this and more. Simply checkout our prelims test series to Discover More.

5. Devoting time

For most candidates, it is an arduous task to clear the exam in the first attempt. This is not one of those exams which can be cleared with half-hearted attempts or with distractions. While having a full-time professional career or studying in college, aspirants tend to get impatient to get over with the vast UPSC exam syllabus and take the exam. However, this test is just the opposite and seeks patience and persistence. We recommend you to prepare well, revise, practice using our subject/topic wise mock tests, and then go ahead with full-length tests. This will not only save time by not going through the lengthy texts of topics not yet prepared during your test, but also boost confidence to pick up and practice more and more topics.

6. Financial Aid

With the trend of coaching centres and their massive publicity, a candidate is obliged to take coaching for IAS preparation. The UPSC exam coaching is peculiar and available in only certain cities. At times, the aspirants have to leave their home and incur heavy financial aid to get the coaching for a dedicated period. The UPSC exam coaching usually lasts from 6 to 12 months. We recommend using the easily available NCERT books and Gold Standard books for preparation. For practice, you can check out are different affordable pricing plans to suit your needs.

7. Self-studying or coaching?

The candidates can be indecisive of whether to get coaching or Self-preparation for UPSC. While some of them opt for coaching, the others resort to self studying. However, it is a candidate’s choice to find an effective way of studying in order to succeed and work towards a bright future. Each person has a different way of learning to get an optimized learning graph. For this, you need to find out what works best for you. Look back at your educational phase and see how and when you performed best. Try and follow the same.

8. Handling failures

Multiple attempts in UPSC can demotivate a person to try over and over again. In addition to this, the exam is conducted only once a year so the UPSC aspirants have to wait for another year to try their luck. Moreover, the candidates cannot analyse their areas of weakness which they should work upon and such a large gap between the attempts can make them forgetful of the topics that need to be covered.
One should keep reading positive books, articles, blogs and try and stay positive. Read some stories of candidates, those people who can be any of us, who made it with their hard work and persistence in the section Your Stories. This should tell you how any one of us can nail it.

9. Setting schedule and time table

As mentioned earlier, the UPSC syllabus seems never-ending. Curating a time table to cover all over 230+ topics of multiple subjects can be downright difficult. Just covering the topics isn’t enough as one has to do multiple revisions to memorise and grasp the concepts. Your schedule needs not only to have study or preparation time but it should also have time for practice tests. Without practice you can never be sure if what you’ve learnt, is thorough or not. So, keep testing yourself regularly. Include that in your time table. In fact, at SprintUPSC, you can plan and schedule tests based on the topics and books you plan to cover. This will help you set clear goals, test them timely, and achieve success. Prepare a simple time table and update it as per your performance and requirements.

10. What if it does not happen ever?

The candidate must have a failover plan, a plan B to resort to if they fail at making their way through the UPSC exam even after trying multiple times. This can be a business or a job as per their specialization and the field they have studied in. Having a backup plan does not show fear of failing but the wisdom of being prepared for any consequences. Hence, It is smart to have a backup plan.

11. Societal Pressure

During a young age, everyone from family to friends wants to see a person grow and succeed in life. They have to manage preparation, career and social pressure of getting married and settling in life. This can make a person anxious, impatient and unfocused. The candidate needs to have uplifting people around them to stay positive. Keep talking to your parents or teachers, whoever you trust can give you good, positive, fruitful advise without any bias.