An over-length precis loses marks under conciseness, one of the six criteria on which the 15-mark precis body is judged. An overshoot of five to ten words is tolerated. Thirty or forty words beyond the target is treated as a failure to compress, and the deduction becomes severe.
Why examiners treat length so strictly
The examiner is not testing whether a candidate understood the passage, because the comprehension question already does that. He is testing whether the candidate can decide what deserves to survive. A precis that runs long proves that decision was never made. Length, in other words, is not a technicality attached to the exercise; it is the exercise. The how CSS and PMS examiners mark a precis article shows why conciseness sits alongside fidelity and completeness in the marking scheme: compression is the skill under examination.
What examiners do with an over-length precis
- Slight overshoot of five to ten words is usually accepted without penalty, since examiners allow a reasonable margin.
- Moderate overshoot of fifteen to twenty-five words deducts marks under conciseness, and the realistic ceiling for the body drops by two to three marks.
- Heavy overshoot of thirty words or more is treated as a failure to compress. Some examiners stop reading at the limit and mark only what falls within it, so concluding ideas earn nothing at all.
Sir Syed Kazim Ali cautions his students against the widespread belief that writing more is safer. In precis, the opposite holds. Extra words add no value to the answer; they advertise the very weakness being examined, and they do so in the first question the examiner reads.
Why writing short is equally dangerous
Candidates who fear the penalty often overcorrect and submit a precis well below one-third of the passage. This attracts its own deduction, and usually a heavier one. A short precis almost always means an entire supporting idea has been dropped, which costs marks under completeness as well as weakening coherence, since the remaining ideas no longer connect. An over-length precis contains everything plus padding; an under-length precis is missing something the examiner expected to find. Of the two errors, the second is harder to recover from.
How to bring an over-length precis back within limit
Whole sentences should never be deleted at random. The first place to look is the author's illustrations, examples, quotations, and repeated ideas, because these are almost always what pushed the draft over. After that, compress the phrasing itself: "in spite of the fact that" becomes "although", and "at this point in time" becomes "now". Removing padding rarely costs meaning, whereas removing a supporting idea always does. The don'ts of precis writing identifies which elements of a passage are expendable, and the proven dos for civil service aspirants in how to write a perfect precis show how much can be cut from a long draft without losing substance.