06 – CSAT Paper Strategy for UPSC Prelims

Last Updated on April 24, 2025 by Admin

Since 2023 Prelims, CSAT has become yet another obstacle in the path to write UPSC Mains. 2023 paper was so surprising, that many good students (including my friend who had secured AIR 64 in GATE), couldn’t clear UPSC Prelims, just because of CSAT.  While the cut-off of GS1 was only 75, many aspirants, despite scoring around 100 in Paper 1, were out of race because of CSAT.

While everyone was wishing that a major relief would come in 2024, the paper was similar to 2023, and again, many aspirants were left stranded.

In this article, we’ll discuss the strategy we need to adopt while writing CSAT mock tests and actual CSAT paper, and ensure that you have a strategy before you go in. This article may not deal with the nitty-gritties of CSAT, or its topic wise analysis. If you are an absolute beginner for CSAT, this article may be of little use to you. 

However, if you are someone who’s been confident about CSAT just before 2023, or in general consider yourselves good in Math & Reasoning, you’re in the right place.

Also keep in mind that even if you’re very good at CSAT, you should give at least 4 mocks (including 2023 and 2024 papers) before Prelims. This will prepare you for the exam.  Because many students don’t practice full length mock tests before exams, and there is no strategy in place to handle the paper, they tend to commit some avoidable mistakes. We’ll try to suggest a strategy in this article. 

How Many Questions to Solve? 

Before considering the number of questions, you should know how many marks you consider as a safe target. While the exam requirement is 66.67, we would recommend keeping a target of at least 85 marks out of 200.  

Next question is, how many questions do you need to solve to achieve this target. Assuming, you’ll have different accuracy, the target may vary. Please refer to the below table for illustration.

From our side, we would recommend solving anywhere from 55-60 questions, with 55 at lower end and 60 at upper. And keeping the target of getting 40 questions right i.e. accuracy of around 70%. 

How many from each Section? 

Continuing from above discussion, let’s say that you’ll be solving 60 questions out of 80. Seen from another angle, you can leave 20 questions out of 80, without bothering to solve them. 

Analysis of Prelims CSAT PYQ suggest that you generally get:

1. 27 questions from comprehension
2. 41 questions from quantitative aptitude
3. 12 questions from reasoning

Based on your strength, you can solve 

1. 25 comprehension questions + 35 quant  and reasoning questions
2. 20 comprehension questions + 40 quant and reasoning questions
3. You can decide apart from above targets

Now as our numbers are decided, let’s assume that you’re solving a total of 60 questions, with 25 comprehension and 35 quant + reasoning questions. 

Said in another fashion, you can leave 2 comprehension questions out of 27, and you should leave 18 quant+reasoning questions out of 53 i.e. you can (you need to) leave every third question in quant + reasoning. And if you can maintain just 70% accuracy, still you can score 85 in CSAT.

I hope that this gives you some relief. If you find the above para confusing, please re-read. 

Strategy While Solving CSAT Paper

Considering all the discussion so far, we can conclude 4 major points. 

• You should solve around 60 questions out of 80
• This will give you 2 minutes per question
• You need to solve almost all questions from comprehension
• You can skip every third question from quant + reasoning
• You need to maintain accuracy of 70% overall. 

Doing Iterations While Solving Paper

It is seen that many students are not able to even finish the CSAT paper. They are not able to reach the end of the paper, and get stuck somewhere around the 70th  question, not even getting time to read the last few questions. This is not a good strategy. 

In the last 10-15 questions you didn’t touch, there could be at least 3-4 questions which were too easy, and you missed them. Getting them right would have made all the difference, but now nothing can be done. 

Scenarios like this should be avoided at all costs. 

Rather, what you should follow is, strategy of doing 2-3 iterations (rounds) of the entire paper. 

For practical purposes, we would recommend only 2 iterations of the entire paper. 

First Round of Solving CSAT Paper

• In the first iteration i.e. the first round of paper, you should solve almost all of the comprehension questions, leaving out the complex ones, or the ones where you’re not able to choose out of two options.
• You should solve around 20-25 quant reasoning questions, picking out the most easy ones. 
• In the first iteration, you can mark questions in three categories – 1) solved ones, 2) to be solved later, 3) to be skipped. You can use different symbols for each category i.e. you can circle, tick mark, draw square around que. no. etc.
• If you’re asking how to identify the difficult and easy questions, it is a matter of practice. If  you have done enough practice, by reading the question you’ll understand which category it belongs to, and how has been your past experience with such questions. Accordingly, you can either solve it, keep it for a second iteration, or skip it altogether. 
• The entire first round of solving should take around 60-70 minutes. Not more than that. And you should be done with 35-40 questions by the end of it. 

Second Iteration

• In the second iteration, for comprehension questions, you need to make a decision. You’ve to choose between the most likely options or leave the question altogether if you feel all four options are confusion.
• For quant and reasoning, you need to solve the questions even if they’re lengthy and need a lot of manual calculation (you should skip such questions in the first round).
• Again, depending on the question, you may skip some of them. However, do remember that you’re not going to visit such questions again. 
• In the second iteration, in 40-50 minutes you get, you should be able to do the 20 questions. Considering you’ve already solved 35-40 questions in the first iteration, it will take your tally to 55-60 questions total. 

Even after the second iteration, if some time is remaining, you should visit the questions you’ve skipped and try to come up with a solution. In no case, should you sit idle waiting for the examiner to collect answer copies. 

Conclusion

What we’ve suggested is a time tested way to approach the CSAT paper. This strategy is highly effective, powerful and will make sure that you’re able to get maximum marks that are possible from a given paper. Some of you may be already having a policy like we’ve suggested, while for others it would be something new. In any case, try to implement it word by word… and as you go along, you yourselves will be able to do customization to this approach based on your strengths, weakness and your personality.

We do hope that CSAT no longer remains an obstacle in your cherished goal. Best wishes!

Do let us know if you’ve any queries or clarifications regarding what we have discussed here.