Does being a "Sharma ji ka beta"increase your chance of clearing CSE? If we go by data, then the answer is (partly) yes!
But, not more than that of Kumar Ji ka beta, Singh ji ka beta or Meena ji ka beta!
Also, if we go by statistics, having your name "Abhishek" definitely helps.
Keep it simple!
The analysis has been done on Namewise CSE prelims 2022 result available on upsc.gov.in
This Sunday, I decided to conduct a analysis of the CSE Prelims result. When I started I was planning to leverage simple NLP tools like TF-IDF to assess the relative importance of each term and then something on the lines of vectorisation to establish relationship between strings of texts
However, I quickly realised that even a simple excel analysis focusing on frequency analysis can be fun and can bring out interesting insights. As the Einstein said -
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
I quickly separated the First name, middle name and last name from the list and used pivot table to create a frequency table. A layman can understand this as using Crtl+F to count how many times each search term (which can be first name, last name or even middle name) is appearing
The findings - Last/Middle Name
Here is the top 10 most common frequencies
Text String | Frequency |
Kumar | 1777 |
Singh | 986 |
Meena | 365 |
Sharma | 281 |
S | 279 |
Yadav | 266 |
Abhishek | 203 |
Gupta | 198 |
Agarwal/Aggarwal/Agrawal/ Agrwal | 168 |
Mishra | 166 |
Jain | 166 |
Shubham | 161 |
Rahul | 151 |
There are 1777 "Kumar" out of 13,000 selected aspirants i.e. 1 out of every 7 aspirants
"Singh" appeared 986 times.
As both Kumar and Singh are generic surnames as they are commonly used as middle names. I remember, I was "Gourav Kumar Sharma" for around one academic year when I decided to change it myself to shorter "Gourav Sharma" and Gourav S later on.
The third most common string was "Meena" with 365 appearances.
Now comes, Sharma ji ka betas/betis with 288 candidates having "Sharma" in their name.
S can be due to people using it as middle name or people shortening to surname e.g. Gourav S
Then comes Gupta and Agarwal. Due to multiple spellings, I decided to club 4 most similar spellings (Yes, excel allows you to do that) - Agarwal/Aggarwal/Agrawal/ Agrwal. "Gupta" appeared 198 times and Agarwal/variants appeared 166 times.
However, owing to my limited knowledge of castes I couldn't group castes with different surname.
Next comes Mishra with frequency of 166.
What if combine most commonly occurring Sharma and related terms - Mishra, Pandey, Tiwari, Shukla, Dwivedi etc. The number comes up to 788!
The findings - First Name
The most common first names are
Abhishek - 203
Shubham - 161
Rahul - 151
Raj - 129
Prakash - 122
Aditya - 111
Ankit - 102
G̶o̶u̶r̶a̶v̶ Gaurav - 99
Saurabh - 92
Ashish - 92
Akshay - 92
Amit - 91
The findings - Full Name
If we combine above results, we can get to the answer
Yes, the most common name in the list was "Abhishek Kumar"
Scope of Improvement
Any socio-religious analysis has been avoided here due to lack of expertise on author's part.
As government jobs are viewed as barometer of social progress in India, this can be used to analyse empowerment status of various social groups in India.
Relative frequency i.e. frequency divided by the population of a "search term" would provide a better analysis to show relative deprivation/empowerment
Temporal analysis through combining data from last 10-15 years.
Due to (assumed) more uniformity in North Indians terms/names in comparison to other parts, the analysis is a little biased towards North Indian names.
People looking to collaborate on further research can mail me at gs@gouravs.com
Disclaimer
Correlation is not causation.
This post in now way encourages you to change your name to Abhishek Kumar or Shubham Kumar. Author holds no liability for someone failing to clear prelims even after changing names.