How To: 5 point approach/stakeholder/critical point/summary/common sense technique

5 point approach:
A common mistake by most of the civil services aspirants is we try to capture maximum points from anything we read. Some of us even try to remember every punctuation or full stop in any article or book chapter. This approach has many pitfalls. One is a person can never remember every bit of information so he is unnecessarily overloading himself with redundant bits of information. Second, even if he is able to remember all the points, in the examination hall he has only limited availability of time, so he will face difficulty in reproducing the most relevant points. Thirdly, such approach will constraint his time. Aspirants often end up spending too much time on one article and in the end regret reading things to such extent.

Remember, UPSC is a generalist examination. It is not a test of your domain specific knowledge. The domain specific portion is tested in paper one of the subject exam. Here breadth of knowdlege is more important than depth of knowledge. This has become all the more important in the light of new pattern of question paper where a GS paper covers 25 topics from different areas of syllabus. In all, one ends up being tested in 100 topics in all four papers together.

Therefore certain preparation strategies needs to be adopted which would help in redducing information overload and saving time. This has some concomitant benefits like easy reproduction, giving the whole preparation a smart touch.

First is: 5 point approach
In this, whenever you read a big editorial of The Hindu or read a article from magazines like World Focus, Yojana etc., do not make notes while reading the article. You can underline things while skimming through the article (Even that has a trick to it). Once you are finished with the article, then ask yourself a innocuous but hard question which is "What are the five points I remember from this article?" Just jot down those five points and take a second scurry look at the article. Add one or two additional points and move on.

The basic philosophy behind this is "You do not want to put efforts into mugging something which you could not capture in the first go itself". So if we are not able to recall it now, how will be able to recall it after reading 3000 such articles and nearly 30 books and after nearly 300 days in the examination hall(examination cycle).

This approach worked very strongly for me in the first attempt. I used to write only those points which I could remember. This way I saved a lot of my energy which otherwise could have gone into remebering points which are tough to remember. This goes against established wisdom. Why should one be writing things which One can remember? Instead, I should be writing points which I can not remember. But my whole philosophy was to put my energy into something which I would be able to remember after reading 3000 articles.

Mind you, this does not mean I should leave all the tough points or compromise on conceptual understanding. Instead, I did focus on those things but in a light hearted manner without getting too emotional about it.

I will discusss other strategies in later articles. Enough for the day.