Hi, my first Mains. I say this with all humility that it was shocking for me because one thing I’ve always been good at is answer writing. People say they score terrible in their first mocks. My first mocks scores were above 95 in all 4 GS papers.
Obviously I can’t say for sure but I think these were the factors due which I missed out:
1. GS 3 paper went terrible (I’m bad at remembering facts anyway)
2. I tookethics case studies lightlybecause I used to score well in the easy ones in mocks. But during exam didn’t really know what to write in the ones that have multiple questions. You have to write unique content in all sub parts.
3. Messed up myfirst optional paperbecause got sick in the gap days, couldn’t revise History map well and then couldn’t complete the paper becausemy hands were freezing and just refused to work faster. ( wrote 3-4 marks worth of content in 3 questions worth 30 marks total). Also, I always finished optional paper before time in mocks.
4. I think history is low scoring anyway. So messing it up was a deal breaker, otherwise it could have easily covered up for loss of marks in GS.
5. I think I was relativelyslower than others in terms of ‘thinking’ and then writing. The fear of time was so much that I just didn’t bother thinking before writing, just wrote whatever came to mind first.
6. I’m not too sure about this but - my marks trajectory in mocks was downhill for some reason. From 115 amd 118s (before prelims) , I got down to 95s in the last month. My reasoning is that I got stuck between trying to stay original and trying to cope up with the demand of coaching institutes (too many diagrams, the language, the exact data etc). But any other opinions are welcome..
@aa12 Initial mocks (ones I wrote in 2020 and before prelims in 2021) I used to get feedback like - you’re definitely going to make it. You have a lot of potential, excellent answers etc etc.
Then in the last 2 simulations- it got bad. They started calling my answers average 😭
I don’t know what went wrong.
@NSEwalaYOGI Forum does that but I think you need to be enrolled with them for some course at least. Not sure, you can ask them
@NSEwalaYOGI do let me know if you find any other answers, please
@NSEwalaYOGI vision bhi deta hai. Charges nahi pata. I took test series, isliye I didn’t have to pay extra.
@NSEwalaYOGI aap Lucknow se hain? 😅
After reading the comments here, I think most of our papers went well, barring GS 3. I’ve not found any single person who found Mains on a whole to be difficult. Sabka acha hua, isiliye competition got tougher.
I think the answer is to write excellent answers now, and not just good/decent ones. We should all write like we want AIR 1 & nothing less. If the papers were fine for us, it went excellent for the 1800 who got in.
