“In the UPSC exam, reserved category students get 60 per cent while general candidates get 80 per cent. Is it fair?” This question raised by a netizen is what pushed activist and Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer MS Nethrapal to carry out a comprehensive analysis of trends in the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) Civil Service Examination (CSE) of 10 years, between 2007 to 2017.
Countering the false narrative being presented on social media, Nethrapal’s analysis shows that the percentage mark difference between the General and reserved categories is actually very low — often less than two to five per cent.
Now the question is, how did he come to this discovery?
“I had been researching UPSC scores for quite some time. I have details of 10,678 candidates from the last 10 years including their ranks, marks in written test, interview marks and category,” Nethrapal, who is also the author of The Pain of Merit: Realities of Reservation book, said in a social media post on Tuesday, April 9.
This data shows that the difference between the average percentage score of the final total (written test marks + personality test marks) of candidates from Other Backward Classes (OBC) category is only 1.29 per cent less than that of a general category candidate.
This means that as per trends in UPSC between 2007 and 2017 on an average, if an OBC candidate requires 46.56 per cent score to qualify the recruitment examination, a General category candidate would do so with 47.85 per cent, making the percentage difference almost negligible.
“This shows that the competition is so high in UPSC that the difference between general and OBC is less than 1-2 per cent. It is very difficult to get into UPSC in each of the categories. This narrative that a General category candidate needs 80 per cent while reserved category student only requires 60 per cent is totally rubbish,” he added.
Here’s what the data says
The analysis by MS Nethrapal shows that the average percentage score of the final total of General category candidates between 2007 and 2017 stands at 47.85 per cent. For OBC candidates, the average percentage score is 46.56 per cent, 45.30 per cent for SC (Scheduled Caste) candidates and 44.70 per cent for ST (Scheduled Tribe) candidates.
This difference between marks scored by candidates from different categories gets even lesser if we look only at the written test scores.
The average written test score percentage for General category candidates between 2007-2017 is 45.65 per cent; 44.59 per cent for OBC candidates, 43.30 per cent for SC candidates and 42.52 per cent for ST candidates.
Nethrapal further suggested that in more cases than not, this difference between the average percentage score of the final total between candidates from different categories comes from Personality Test scores, instead of the written test scores.
Interestingly, when the data of Top 100 scorers from the Scheduled Caste (SC) category in UPSC CSE between 2007 to 2017 was analysed, it showed that most of these students get comparatively lesser scores in the personality test, despite scoring well in the written test.
In fact, out of these 100 SC students, only one student had scored over 200 out of a total 300 marks in the personality test, the data showed.
