Union Public Service Commission is a constitutional body that conducts various exams to fill the vacancies at Group A and Group B posts.
And the Civil Services Exam (CSE) is one of the exams conducted by the commission. It is most popular exam among all of the exams conducted by the UPSC.
The posts such as IAS, IPS, IFS and IRS come under this exam and hence most of the aspirants get attracted towards that exam.
There are three stages of the exam namely prelims, mains and the interview. There are two papers in the prelims and nine papers in the mains exam.
The preliminary exam is objective in nature means there will be multiple choice questions whereas the mains will have descriptive papers.
The Pattern of the Exam
Prelims
| Subjects | No. of Questions | Marks | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| General Studies I | 100 | 200 | 2 hours |
| General Studies II or CSAT | 80 | 200 | 2 hours |
Mains
| No. | Subjects | Marks | Nature |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paper A ( Indian Language ) | 300 | Qualifying |
| 2 | Paper B (English) | 300 | Qualifying |
| 3 | Essay | 250 | |
| 4 | General Studies I (Indian Heritage and Culture, History and Geography of the World and Society) | 250 | |
| 5 | General Studies II (Governance, Constitution, Polity, Social Justice and International relations) | 250 | |
| 6 | General Studies III (Technology, Economic Development, Bio-diversity, Environment, Security and Disaster Management) | 250 | |
| 7 | General Studies IV (Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude) | 250 | |
| 8 | Optional Paper I | 250 | |
| 9 | Optional Paper II | 250 |
Interview
| Personality Test | 275 marks |
Number of Attempts & Age Limit
The list of the Services under UPSC CSE
List of optional subjects for Main Examination
- Agriculture
- Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Science
- Anthropology
- Botany
- Chemistry
- Civil Engineering
- Commerce and Accountancy
- Economics
- Electrical Engineering
- Geography
- Geology
- History
- Law
- Management
- Mathematics
- Mechanical Engineering
- Medical Science
- Philosophy
- Physics
- Political Science and International Relations
- Psychology
- Public Administration
- Sociology
- Statistics
- Zoology
- Literature of any one of the following languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and English.