CSS exam: frozen in time.
After seeing the confusing CSS questions on social media, I picked the CSS questions that were asked in 1968, 1969 and onward; there is not much difference between the papers of 1968 and 2019.
I then looked at the question papers from last year and realised that they are still the same. According to a report by ‘Daily Dunya’, CSS aspirants were asked to pen down an essay on a topic for the year 2017; surprisingly, it was the same topic that was requested UPSC exam in 2013; the essay topic was “Is the colonial mentality impeding Pakistan progress?
With all the technological development and recruitment practice, the CSS exam remains frozen in time. Perhaps the only innovation was the clustering of elective subjects and the inclusion of multiple-choice questions. How do you manage to stand still for decades while the world moves on? The answer is only the outdated government machinery because of the remnants of the British colonial system. But unlike us, the British moved on.
The UK civil service follows the four-stage exams and recruitment system. The first stage is the ‘application sift’ in the UK. This is something that the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) also does, but in an undeveloped fashion. The UK civil service requires writing a personal statement; the CSS application is limited to biographical and academic information.
The second stage is the standardised test stage, the UK system conduct tests through a simple, efficient and low-cost process. The FPSC and UPSC, on the other hand, undertake the full-scale exam of 12 subjects, and more than 18000 students appear. This massive exercise results in the selection of only 300-400 candidates, who are then taken to the interview stage.
The next stage in UK civil service is a two-day assessment centre. The method includes a standardized evaluation of behaviour based on simulations, interviews, group activities, etc., to help reveal various aspects of a candidate’s personality. On the other hand, CSS conduct only simple psychological test that evaluates the candidate. The last stage is interviews that are somehow the same in both systems.
The cost of this outdated system is huge. In 2019-20, FPSC spent Rs810 million for 290 CSS allocations. The average cost per recruitment turned out to be a staggering Rs600,000+. But even more alarmingly, considering the massive scale of CSS exams taking up at least 50% capacity of FPSC, one can safely assume that the government spent about Rs1.4 million to recruit each CSS candidate.
Although the population of India is much higher than in Pakistan, the passing ratio of UPSC is 0.13% only as compared to the 1.9% passing ratio of the CSS exam. Why there is a gap between the passing ratio of UPSC and CSS? The answer is simple. As mentioned above, our questions are somehow the same for half a century and are mostly asked from UPSC exams; another factor is the screening test; last year, CSS conducted a screening test just like emails and the screening test of UPSC exam. The passing ratio was 99.9% for CSS and 10 to 12% for UPSC. It is time to reform the outdated and expensive exam system of CSS.
