This year RBI completely overhauled the syllabus. A few tried to undermine the changes by calling them insignificant or incremental. RBI proved all of them wrong.
This year, the change in pattern was both
explicit and implicit
.
Preparing for new pattern the old way?
A lot has been said and written about the Phase 2 descriptive strategy. There are multiple schools of thoughts about descriptive strategy.
Three Major school of thoughts
"Writers" School of thought: Advocates that writing practice is the most crucial component of mains preparation and this alone is sufficient to sail you through.
"Scholars" school of thought: Believes in Knowledge of power. Advocates that content is the king and once you are good with the content, your writing style doesn't matter.
"Reverse Engineers" school of thought: Takes the worst of both worlds. They procure all available test series in the market and try to read it. They neither practice tests nor focus on their content
The question arises why none has succeeded in discovering the formula for the success in phase 2 exam. Every year, every topper speaks differently and suggests different methods.
More and more material is dumped. on aspirants without thinking about actual time available with the aspirants.
Scientifically Designed Course
The answer lies in lack of scientific approach towards the descriptive preparation. Ill planned courses for descriptive preparation has done more harm than good. Many instructors often fail to recognize and acknowledge the fact that an aspirant has hardly 12 days after Phase 1 for Phase 2 preparation, out of which only 6-7 days should ideally be given to descriptive prep. This roughly translates to 350 hours of productive study.
The need of the hour is to balance between different approaches. Acads Compact RBI Combo [CRC] Program balances between the need of writing tests with 2 iterations of