UPSC interview marks, and what boards ask

The UPSC interview is out of 275. The median topper in our data scored 184, and most rank holders landed between 160 and 204. The highest mark we have is 225, by Tejaswini Singh (AIR 62, CSE 2025). The lowest that still made the final list was 127.

Those numbers sit in a narrow band, which is exactly why the interview matters. Candidates with the same written marks regularly finish hundreds of ranks apart because of it, and your Mains score tells you almost nothing about how your interview will go.

The top 50 had a median of 190; ranks below 600 had 165. That 28-mark difference is the interview's share of the gap between a top rank and a rank near the end of the list. None of the 211 top-100 rankers in our data scored below 154.

Only 74 of 378 toppers reached 200, and 29 made the list with less than 160. Most of the list sits within about 40 marks of each other, so moving from 160 to 184 is worth more ranks than almost any single Mains paper.

Look at the written column. Several of these toppers had ordinary Mains scores, and the interview is what pulled them into a good rank.

Sort every marksheet by interview marks →

And a great written score doesn't carry you. Ramesh Chandra Verma wrote 844 in Mains in CSE 2023 and got 138 in the interview: AIR 150. Mohit Gupta wrote 835 in Mains in CSE 2022 and got 146 in the interview: AIR 195. Across all 378 toppers, the correlation between written and interview marks is -0.03, which is effectively none. The interview is its own paper.

Current affairs is the biggest block at 35%, but it is rarely random. A civil engineer was asked about drainage and coastal regulation, an electrical engineer about grid stability and transformers, a doctor about medical tourism and violence against doctors. The candidate's own form chose the topics.

Home state came up in 10 of the 11 interviews where the candidate's state was known, and hobbies in 9 of 13 where they were listed. One board asked nine questions about cricket and sketching alone. "Why civil services" was asked just 3 times in 347 questions, and the optional made up only 5%.

Two rules follow. Write only what you can talk about for ten minutes. And prepare your district, your degree and your hobbies before you prepare anything else: that is where boards spend their time.

Interview marks are from the marks UPSC publishes for recommended candidates after each final result. We use 378 rank holders from CSE 2022–25 (125 from 2022, 106 from 2023, 47 from 2024, 100 from 2025). It is a sample of toppers, not every candidate, and the recent years are smaller and lean towards top ranks.

The board questions come from 14 transcripts of CSE 2025 interviews, written by the candidates and published on ForumIAS. They are recollections and often incomplete. We sorted every question by hand and quote nothing word for word.

Our data methodology →