MAD FOR NOMADS: A GUIDE TO HEURISTICS IN UPSC CIVIL SERVICES PRELIMINARY EXAM (1/N)

 Civil services prelims exam requires some heuristic and lateral vision of knowledge that helps and comes in handy. 

Like, I have watched Aptitude videos of Satyam sir in Understand UPSC and wanted to pen it down once and for all, in a theoretical framework to formalize all the known heuristics up until now. 

Like, I categorize problem solving abilities into three parts, namely, 

1. Pure conceptual, factual or knowledge-based clarity excluding Deductions. 

2. Deductive reasoning which requires basic subject knowledge, conceptual clarity and rest, logical reasoning. These include, 

(a) Including subject specific concepts to deduce,

(b) Using in general logic to deduce, Like Finding Contradictions in options, etc. 

3. Pure Heuristics: Which includes, 

    (a) Linguistics, that involves Language games, like observing the previous papers and finding out the language in which UPSC frames correct options and the language in which it frames wrong options, so basically its observational skills with Inductive reasoning. 

(b) Statistics, that involves having a clear cut data on things like, How many times in the last year, has UPSC given a phrase, "At least 30%" and the statement was correct, if you have that rough estimate, you can apply induction and induce that this particular option, though you have no idea about it, is more likely to be correct. 

This is the broad overview to the world that we call MAD, or MCQ Aptitude Development. I have learned it from Satyam sir, and I wish to systematize it. Not only I wish to do this, But I wish to do statistical basic research, and give a data on how many times a particular technique could have been applied and how many times out of these, It gave correct answer. I was inspired to do this because of last year's ranker Devika Priyadarshini madam, she did the same last year. 

This will help me summarize MAD techniques. Also, I will keep it in different series. 

1. Subject wise basic principles and PYQ analysis and Applications of Deductions. 

2. Year wise MAD Application research document. 

Let us try to do this in a few days. Let's see where we go.