Syllabus
UPSC IFoS — What the syllabus covers
- Preliminary Examination
- Identical to the Civil Services Examination — General Studies Paper I covering current events, history and the national movement, geography, polity and governance, economic and social development, environment and ecology, and general science; and CSAT Paper II covering comprehension, reasoning, decision making, mental ability and basic numeracy, which is qualifying.
- Mains Paper I — General English
- An essay, precis writing, comprehension of given passages, and usage and vocabulary. Three hundred marks assessing command of written English rather than literary knowledge.
- Mains Paper II — General Knowledge
- Indian polity, Indian and world geography, history of India, current national and international events, and general science with an emphasis on environment, ecology and conservation. Three hundred marks, and considerably narrower than the four general studies papers of the Civil Services Examination.
- Optional subjects
- Two subjects chosen from a prescribed list — agriculture, agricultural engineering, animal husbandry and veterinary science, botany, chemistry, chemical engineering, civil engineering, forestry, geology, mathematics, mechanical engineering, physics, statistics and zoology. Each contributes two papers of 200 marks. Certain combinations are disallowed, and the notification sets out which.
Because eight hundred of the fourteen hundred mains marks come from the optional subjects, the choice of optionals is the most consequential decision in IFoS preparation. The sensible basis is your degree background — a candidate who studied botany and zoology is starting a long way ahead of one choosing them from scratch — tempered by the availability of material and the disallowed-combination rules.
The syllabus has an unusual shape that should be read carefully before any planning: the preliminary stage is borrowed wholesale from the Civil Services Examination, and everything after it is a different examination built around two science subjects. That means the first three months of an IFoS preparation look exactly like a Civil Services preparation and the remaining nine do not, and a candidate who does not notice the join will spend the second half of the year reading general studies material for papers that will never ask about it.
Check which optional pairings are permitted
The notification lists combinations of optional subjects that may not be taken together — typically those with substantial overlap, such as certain pairings among the agricultural, forestry and biological sciences. Choosing two subjects you are strong in, and then discovering the pairing is disallowed, forces a late substitution into a subject you have not prepared. Confirm the combination before you begin, not at the application stage.
