Dear Students,

As you know, Civilsdaily has been expanding its offerings. Its portfolio now consists of many products – Prelims TS & Samachar Manthan have already created a name for themselves. SIP was a huge hit and our Mains Program,  though in its first year, has already got huge enrollments.

We get a lot of emails on a regular basis asking us to resume Target Mains – Daily Answer Writing program and provide answer evaluation. You will agree that we are very prompt at taking feedback and incorporating it. We included prelims tests in Samachar Manthan and have come out with numerous other materials which students have demanded. So when students ask us for Target Mains, we obviously want to go for it. They indeed provide value in terms of writing practice and help in visualizing how questions on certain topics can be framed.

However, there are many issues that make it ineffective

1. Forming questions from today’s news – Questions asked in UPSC are generally on an overarching theme. Very rarely will you find a question whose basis was just one single op-ed or news item.
2. Repetition of questions – As an issue updates with time, the answers become obsolete. That is why it is more important to frame questions on issues when 3-4 articles have already been written on them.
3. Quality of both questions and answer checking – If we are making questions every day, they will not be intelligent. They will come directly from op-ed/news headings.
4. The unreliability of peer reviews – Peer reviews cannot be relied on and show a lot of variabilities. It is very important that you get a feedback from someone experienced when it comes to your style, substance, and presentation.

We know that re-starting Target Mains will get us a lot of participation. In our previous versions, we had over 200 students submitting their answers on a daily basis. But ultimately such initiatives had very limited returns. 

We have included weekly mains tests in our Samachar Manthan module to help students develop their writing competency. Formal reviews at such low costs do not exist anywhere. We want to

Further, we will be putting down a list of questions on every story on the story pages itself to help you visualize how questions can be framed. This will also prevent question overloading where only the most deserving questions make it to the list.