Decision-making case studies (non-negative marking)

The story

A young SDM finds two villagers at her gate. One claims he has paid land revenue for thirty years; the other says the land is his by inheritance. The records office is shut for a long weekend. The patwari is on leave. The mob outside is growing. She must do something in the next forty minutes — but the options are not "correct" or "incorrect", only "more wrong" and "less wrong". She calls for a senior officer, posts the case to the next working day, and asks the constable to bring both men water in the meantime.

A CSAT candidate, a week earlier, faced almost the same scenario in five sentences and four options. He picked the option that did not suggest immediate action because he had been told to and lost two marks. He misread the rule: the prepared decision-making answer is the one that buys time and does not insult the person in front of you. There is no "shake your head and walk away" option.

Decision making in CSAT is not a personality test. It is a recognition test for which of four ham-fisted responses leaves the fewest scars.

Why this matters for UPSC

Decision making and situational awareness contribute 6 to 8 marks per CSAT — about 10% of the qualifying paper. UPSC has never released an official key for this section, so debate rages, but the expert consensus on "best" answers is reasonably stable. The negative-marking exemption applied to the decision-making questions in the years that carried them. Note what that is worth today: no standalone decision-making question appears in any paper from 2018 to 2026 (checked against all 720 questions in backend/db/pyq_papers/), so there is currently no block for the exemption to apply to.