Hi All,

I hope you have gone through my analysis regarding performance of Optional Subjects in UPSC MAINS from 2013-2017. If you haven’t, click on this link to read it.

The good news for those opting Psychology as their optional is that Psychology ranks among top 3 subjects opted by over 1000 Aspirants (2013-17).

Here, I am mentioning Psychology Strategy by Anuraj Jain, IAS who topped Psychology with 333 Marks.

Here is his strategy is his own words:

Brief introduction about myself:

I am 2015 graduate from BITS Pilani with BE(Hons) in Electrical and Electronics and MSc(Hons) in Mathematics. My optional is psychology and this post is to explain in detail about my strategy for psychology. My score in the first attempt was 267 and this year it was 333, which was a jump of about 66 marks , that pushed me in top 25 despite a very poor score in essay paper (100).

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So what made me choose psychology:

At BITS Pilani we have a system of taking elective  courses and during one semester I had opted for psychology, and generally found it decent to study. Now to be honest I had to cover almost entire syllabus of paper 1 in around 4 months along with 7 other courses so you all can easily gauge what kind of understanding would I be having of psychology at that stage. Nevertheless having performed below average  in core Mathematics related subjects in college I ruled out Mathematics and Electrical was opted out since our college syllabus had poor overlap with UPSC syllabus, so I thought that it was best to choose psychology. So this establishes a fact that its totally possible for a non psychology graduate to get good marks in psychology.

To be very honest it was just a decision based on limit exposure in college. Maybe I would have gone for Pub Ad or Socio or Pol Science had I got some brief exposure in college and also would have found them interesting

So lesson 1, choose an optional subject that you find decently interesting and you can devote few years and do not change your optional finding it unable to study .

Book list for optional:

Paper 1 

• NCERT 11 and 12.
• Robert A Baron (4th ed). I had it since my college time.
• Class notes of Mukul Pathak sir (not the printed ones with a lot of redundant garbage).

As Anuraj has already uploaded his strategy on his blog, I am not mentioning it in full here.

Read Full Strategy on Anuraj’s Blog at following link: 

Anuraj Jain, IAS Psychology Topper Strategy.