Popular coaching institution for IAS (Civil Services) exams, Shankar IAS Acadmey has released the answer keys for IAS 2020 prelims that was held this past Sunday. Candidates who appeared in the Civil Services preliminary exam can now refer to the Shankar IAS CSAT 2020 answer key to match their answers and analyse their exam performance.
In order to download the keys, one has to visit shankariasacademy.com. Once the page loads, a pop up appears with an announcement. This announcement contains the UPSC preliminary 2020 GS 1 and 2 answer keys. Clicking the links against GS I, and GS 2 opens the respective PDF files.
The answer key of GS paper 1 contains the questions, answers of 100 questions that were asked in the exam. The key provided by Shankar IAS academy has questions, as well as the options that were there in the exam. Answers as per Shankar IAS academy are marked in bold red. At the opening of the paper, the coaching says that the answer key is subject to 2% error.
Likewise the answer key of GS paper 2 has answers of all the 80 questions that were in the exam. Again, the answers are in red. However in this key, the academy says that it is subject to 4-5% error.
It may be noted that in the UPSC prelims, there were four sets of questions paper each in paper 1 and 2. The sets were A, B, C, D. Now the answer key provided by Shankar IAS Academy is against Set B of each. However since it is in question-answer format, candidates with any question paper set can simply match the answers against the questions. All sets have the same questions with jumbled order or questions, and sometimes jumbled options.
For each correct answer, candidate gets 2 marks in paper 1, and 2.5 marks in paper 2. Likewise for incorrect answers, marks are deducted. The negative marking being 2/3 in paper 1, and 2.5/3 in paper 2.
While the IAS aspirants can analyse their exam performance, and even predict chances of clearing the exam by comparing to expected and past year cut offs, there is not exactly any actual way of predicting the exact outcome as UPSC officially releases the answer keys after results.
Coming to results, candidates can expect the results in November. The mains for IAS 2020 is scheduled for January 8, 9, 10, 16, and 17, 2021. The IAS prelims was held on October 4, 2020.
While comparing predicted score with last year cut off, one can take note of the last year cut off. Last year the IAS prelims cut off was 98 for general category, 90 for EWS, 95.34 for OBC, 82 for SC, and 77.34 for ST candidates.
