Mukul Pathak Psychology Notes Download Pdf
Tanja Freeze
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)
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
Apart from it I had solved Previous year questions of around 25 years, whose compilation is attached below. Finally did a lot of research on the Internet related to things I did not find in standard books. This gave me lot of new information generally not found in textbooks. Apart from this I have not read any other book. I also had Morgan and King but didnt find it very useful as it was largely repetetive after Pathak sirs classes.
Some toppers get absolutely great marks without coaching and few do not get marks even after coachings. So its for each individual to decide whether he should or should not join a coaching institute. if you find a peer group that can teach you difficult concepts or you can use internet fruitfully coaching may not be that necessary.
Let teacher teach in class and in that time just keep understanding with full focus and revise on a daily basis . Do not hesitate to ask doubts in the classes and most importantly DO NOT sit with your friends. You may find this strange but this lets you concentrate well. I am not saying to become an introvert and not make any friends but inside class your sole focus should be the teacher. Side by side read the same chapter form NCERT and Baron as well to understand the particular topic well. Do not attempt to make short notes from the day 1 itself because you may jot down all irrelavent stuff or may miss out necessary stuff. I will deal with notes making in a later section. In course of 4-5 months till syllabus gets over you should have also revised it at least twice. No need to mug up everything at this moment but be sure that you are able to grasp all the concepts taught in class , written in books etc. After this you should do one thorough revision of entire syllabus, before delving into prelims preparation.
You all may skip the coaching class portion, and start first with NCERT , supplementing it with baron and handwritten class notes. For areas one is not able to understand go for peer group or online search
Please understand you cannot keep repeating same things expecting better results. Analyze what may have gone wrong, see answers of others who are getting better marks than you , rectify mistakes and lastly please do not lose hope.
Once prelims is over one should join a test series. During my first attempt I joined pathak sirs test series which was decent however I could not find value addition in that but in my second attempt I was fortunate enough to find Ankit Kumar Pathak over telegram who is psychology topper of CSE 2017. He checked my copies, taught me value addition material like relavant diagrams case studies etc. I implemented all above religiously and got a good score. I also want to thank another senior Mr Saurabh Jain who taught me how should one study Psychology concepts (I have discussed this with an example below). Simultaneously in initial 40 days after prelims I had prepared notes for both paper 1 and paper 2 which led to one revision as well as I used that period fruitfully which others may generally waste.
I am not a big fan of digital technology unlike others using evernote so I used pen and paper to jot down my notes. Now I used to combine 3 items for any chapter i.e. Class notes of pathak sir, NCERT and Baron. Once this was done I used to see PYQ from the pdf (to gain knowledge of things asked in past from that particular topic that I have never come across in all these three sources). This was added in the notes. I am attaching the notes for 1 particular chapter for your reference. They may not be very clear and logically arranged as I have added materials over 2 attempts in the same notes. (1 disadvantage of not going digital)
Many of you would ask for all the notes but trust me rather than making sense out of my notes you all should prepare your own notes. I say this because self generated cues are best to recall, says a psychologist in memory chapter. I may have missed certain items that I would have remembered while included certain items that maybe redundant for others. So I say again that do make your own notes.
Note: In the above notes I am not very sure whether you people grasp things but notice how I have mentioned name of psychologists, drawn diagrams , used Mnemonics etc. to remember stuff . Please use this just as a reference and nothing more.
Word of caution. Whenever you make notes please remember that you have to revise all of them before your final UPSC exam. Hence you should be able to revise all of them in the gap between the language and optional papers. In first attempt I had made a bit crisp notes since only 1 day gap was there but in my second attempt since there were 5 days hence I expanded the same notes.
We can start with a simple definition of intelligence as act purposefully and deal effectively with the environment (quote scholar Neisser who gave this definition). Link a real life example say A student going to a new place for study and slowly learning the customs of place and gradually settling down over there is an intelligent behavior.
This will give clear understanding to examiner that candidate has understood the concept well with a view of various scholars. Try going about most of topics like learning , personality, motivation, attitude, emotions , sleep etc in a similar manner with adequate and famous scholars to support your views
For this I again relied on Class notes, and solving PYQ to get a feel what was being asked. I realized that many of PYQ were completely different from the class material so i just googled the same and added the same in my notes. I did see some youtube small videos to get familiar with the concepts of T test, ANOVA etc. Other things are present in the class notes like grounded theory , IRT , SDT etc. Whenever in doubt about any of these areas consult Youtube and google which turn out to be your best friends.
Now many people have problem of finishing the paper. I suppose there are 2 problems with this. Either you are not having good revision hence are unable to reproduce the material or in general the writing speed is slow. Both have almost similar remedies , revise and keep practising which will gradually increase your speed. I had clear strategy as soon as paper comes I attempt the Q no 1 and 5 that are compulsory within 75-77 minutes. Each of the question is allotted around 7 min and 30 seconds. Next go for the optional questions. Again 36 minutes for each is allotted. So around 11 minutes each for the 15 markers and 14 minutes around for the 20 marker questions. All the above calculations were religiously followed by me even in the final exam. Keep a digital watch right in front of your eyes with a timer so that you may never loose track of time (I am laying specific focus on digital watch, avoid analog ones)
Since I prepared every topic as a 60 marker, for observation I collected 15-20 points which I could later expand in the exam. An easy way to do that is to compare the given topic with other related topics. So if observation alone comes as a 60 marker (most likely it will be in conjunction with some other topic), just link it with case studies, experimental research, interview, etc.
It is an important topic not only for the psychology paper but even for other optionals such as Sociology, Essay and for GS. Since examples can be included very easily, I concentrated on collecting the keywords and theories that explain the two. This topic should be linked to other topics in both paper 1 and paper 2.
I am posting this topic because it is a classic example of those topics where a lot of material is available on the net, yet the time which might be invested in collecting data which is relevant might be much more than what you would invest if you think about the points on your own. I just collected some facts from the net.
Again a topic where we need to use our GS knowledge. I noted some of the schemes and institutes which I could find on the net. I added all the schemes and various bodies which are working in this field that I had come across in the India Yearbook.
Hi Anay,
I am wondering as to how much flexibility and originality we can bring in the answers of pubadm and psychology Paper-1. Since they are mostly about theories ( leaving out few units) and have a set of priciples etc and the questions are just twisted where essentially we have to write the same stuff ( though a little bit moulded as per the question) ; hence according to you how can we make those answers( paper-1) more creative ( apart from few GS points here and there) ?
In paper 2 I found a lot of scope for original answers .Kindly help.