How To: Common Sense approach

Many times You must have noticed that people who work very hard in general studies are not scoring high marks but a candidate who is not even reading the newspaper regularly manages to score decently high marks in general studies paper. And we are left wondering "How does he manage to do this"?

Well, There is no rocket science. It is all about understanding examiner's psyche and capturing the demand of the question. Mainly the scoring on an answer depends on two things, one is content and second is the presentation. Here I am talking about content. We will deal with the presentation aspect in a separate post. We have already seen the stakeholder approach of content generation and 5-point approach of reading articles. Here I am discussing common sense approach which is used by most of these smart asses to outnumber a hardworking sincere candidate in GS question.

According to this approach, anyone investing too much time in GS content is a fool. For the simple reason, that GS is a bottomless borderless sea. With the same effort, we can improve more in subject or essay. Therefore, These candidates use common sense to generate points.

As per common sense, whenever you are asked various reforms in any system, you can put forth 10 universal points which work everywhere in the Indian context.
For example, Recently CJI T S Thakur made an emotional appeal to Prime Minister to play his part in the process of judicial reforms. In the light of above, Suggest the reform in the Judicial system of India?

With closed eyes and total ignorance of the issue, one can write
1. Need of reforms in legislative framework
2. Need to train more human resources and improve the capacity and skills of existing human resource
3. More efforts need to be put in research and development. Focus should be put on data analytics and in-house technology development.
4. We need to adopt international best practices in this regard.
5. Community participation is must to reform this system. We need to make the community aware and more participative in the process.
6. We need to involve more women in the system at every level. They can bring a perspective of care, sensitivity, and responsiveness in the system.
7. Institutional support needs to be spruced up. More infrastructure needs to be built to match the burgeoning need of Indian population.
8. Proper mechanism of auditing, monitoring and performance evaluation needs to be put in place to reduce corruption and promote transparency.
9. Practices of ethical good governance need to be adopted.
10. The Public should be made more aware. A mass awareness campaign should be launched.
11. Greater budgetary support is needed to put reform plan in action.

A comprehensive systemic reform is the need of the hour. Then only we can realise the vision of inclusive and sustainable development.

Now with this template in hand, one can easy write any answer. This same answer can be used for any kind of systematic reforms. Be it police reforms or press reforms or education or health or irrigation or agriculture or tourism whatever. A smart candidate pulls out this template of eleven points and fills it at certain points with whatever little bits of information he knows. And that's it. With a decent presentation skill, he'll have a presentable above average answer. This is like having a gravy. Put some pieces of paneer or other vegetable and you will have various dishes ready for consumption.

Even the same points of reform can act as points of criticism of any issue. Apart from this other general phrases of criticism could also be included. For like, cure worse than the disease, or mere lip service to promise, eye wash or handwaving or armchair theorising or devils in the details or data-agnostic or knee-jerk reaction and so on. These could be golden words for criticizing any government scheme or policy or bill or foreign policy initiative.

However, not many candidates have this macro bird-eye view of GS paper. Thus, people end up vomiting some random piece of information without arranging it in proper format and without capturing the demand of question. After all, Common sense is not so common. And this becomes the difference between success and failure. Merely knowing is always not enough, doing is the key to future.