You are in: Home → About Civil Services → IAS Prelims Syllabus

IAS Prelims Syllabus

The Preliminary Examination of Union Public Service Commission for Civil Services Examination is also popularly called CSAT or Civil Services Aptitude Test. The CSAT is actually the second paper of General Studies that was introduced in 2011. The CSAT was implemented to end the use of scaling system for varying subjects in the General Studies paper and was a matter of concern for many Civil Services councilors. With the introduction of the CSAT, the UPSC now intends to choose Civil Servants who not only have the knowledge but also the aptitude for reasoning and analytical brain.

A very important point to be noted is that there is Negative Marking in the prelims and 1/3rd of marks allotted for every question is reduced from your score if you get it wrong. So do not guess!

There are some changes made in the Civil Services Examination from 2013. It's for the first time the Indian Forest Service (IFS) aspirants were combined with the Civil Services aspirants and are made to take Preliminary examination. Those Indian Forest Service aspirants who may eventually clear the Preliminary examination have to write separate exams for their Mains Indian Forest Service examination.

UPSC Preliminary Examination Syllabus 2015

Syllabus of Paper I (200 marks) Duration: Two hours


  • Current events of national and international importance.

  • History of India and Indian National Movement.

  • Indian and World Geography - Physical, Social, Economic geography of India and the World.

  • Indian Polity and Governance-Constitution, Political System, Panchayat Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.

  • Economic and Social Development – Sustainable Development, Poverty, Inclusion, Demographics, Social Sector Initiatives, etc.

  • General issues on Environmental ecology, Bio-diversity and Climate Change - that do not require subject specialization.

  • General Science.

Syllabus for Paper II (200 marks) Duration: Two hours


  • Comprehension

  • Interpersonal skills including communication skills

  • Logical reasoning and analytical ability

  • Decision making and problem solving

  • General mental ability

  • Basic numeracy (numbers and their relations, orders of magnitude, etc.) (Class X level), Data interpretation (charts, graphs, tables, data sufficiency etc. - Class X level)

  • English Language Comprehension skills (Class X level).

  • Questions relating to English Language Comprehension skills of Class X level (last item in the Syllabus of Paper-II) will be tested through passages from English language only without providing Hindi translation thereof in the question paper.

  • The questions will be of multiple choices, objective type.

New Changes in Prelims Papers

The Prelims Paper 2 (CSAT) will only be a qualifying paper with 33% as the qualification marks. Therefore its weightage has been drastically reduced and the weightage for Paper-I has been tremendously increased. There by Paper-1 will be the decide whether the candidate gets selected or not.

Note:It is mandatory for the candidate to appear in both the Papers of Civil Services (Prelim) Examination for the purpose of evaluation. Therefore a candidate will be disqualified in case he/she does not appear in both the papers of Civil Services (Prelim) Examination.