How to Choose Optional Subject for UPSC?

This article provides guidelines on how to Choose an Optional Subject for UPSC Civil Services Examination (CSE/IAS/IPS) and the Indian Forest Service (IFoS) Examination. Many aspirants don’t have a clear idea of the advantages and disadvantages of picking up a subject as optional. The following suggestions help you to pick up an optional.

There is no best optional that fetches you maximum marks. If you analyse the average scoring of all optional subjects for a period of 10 years, you will realise that all optional subjects fetch decent marks with +/- 5% variance.

Choosing an optional depends on the following parameters

• Your Interest
• The toughness of the subject
• Availability of books and study material (Nowadays, over-content is available on the internet. So this is not going to be a big problem.)
• Can you study the selected subject for a longer duration?
• Familiarity with Syllabus
• Analysis of Previous Year Question Papers

If you are from an engineering background (or arts background), you are most lean towards selecting engineering (or arts) background optional. However, Many engineering graduates succeeded with humanities optional also. Hence all subjects including literature optional subjects can be taken by anyone.

Once you prepare a specific optional subject for an attempt, do not change it every time. You should stick to it. If it does not interest you, then change the pattern of study, not the optional subject itself. If you keep on changing the optional, you will lose a lot of time that you may not be able to recover.

List of Optional Subjects

1. Agriculture
2. Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Science
3. Anthropology
4. Botany
5. Chemistry
6. Civil Engineering
7. Commerce and Accountancy
8. Economics
9. Electrical Engineering
10. Geography
11. Geology
12. History
13. Law
14. Management
15. Mathematics
16. Mechanical Engineering
17. Medical Science
18. Philosophy
19. Physics
20. Political Science and International Relations
21. Psychology
22. Public Administration
23. Sociology
24. Statistics
25. Zoology
26. Literature of any one of the following languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and English.