Editorial policy
How CAShorts chooses, writes and checks its stories, and who signs them.
Who writes the stories
Every story and Explainer is signed by the CAShorts Desk. The desk writes them with AI writing tools, to the written standard and the checks on this page. Mudit Jain is the person behind CAShorts, and is not named as the author of the stories.
The writer, the solver and the reviewer described below are separate AI sessions, so no story is approved by the session that wrote it.
What we cover
CAShorts covers the news a UPSC Civil Services aspirant needs for Prelims and Mains. A story is chosen only when it has clear value for the exam, and it must pass three tests:
- it is not on our list of news we never cover;
- it has a real, dated event behind it;
- the news itself carries the idea the exam can ask about.
It must also have a connection to India, shown by its source, unless it is one of four kinds of foreign news that matter for the exam on their own: a place in the news, an international body or treaty, global science, or a disease.
We leave out routine crime, celebrity news, party rhetoric, local incidents and opinion. Each story is scored for its value to the exam by a separate check from the one that picked it, and only stories above a set bar are written. We never add a story to fill the day.
Each morning's edition carries the news of the day before. News that cannot wait is added during the day.
Explainers are pages on one idea behind the news, such as an Act, a body or a concept, chosen at their own bar. When recent news brings the idea up, the page says which.
Our sources
We write from primary documents first: the Act or rule, the judgment, the government's release, the report, the international body's own page. News reports are our other source. An Indian Express Explained article may also be a source, and an explainer from The Hindu a supporting source.
We never use opinion pieces or editorials, or any other outlet's explainers.
Every sentence is our own: we do not copy a source or closely rewrite it. Each story credits its source.
How a story is made
- Writing. The desk drafts each story with AI writing tools, from its sources, to a written house standard: a short card that says what happened; a longer explanation, with the background, why it matters, key facts, Prelims pointers and Mains angles; and UPSC-style practice questions, each with an explanation.
- A blind check of the questions. A separate solver, which has not seen the answers, answers every question. Its answers are compared with the writer's, and a question without exactly one defensible answer is fixed.
- A fact check. A separate reviewer, which did not write the story, checks every fact in it and every statement in its questions against the dated sources, and fixes what is wrong. A story with a fact that cannot be confirmed is held back, not published.
- Automatic checks. Software checks every story against the house standard: the length of each part and the form of each question. It also flags any figure the sources do not carry, and each flag is fixed or explained before the story goes on.
- Publishing. Only a story that has passed every step, and has its picture, is published.
Practice questions
Our questions are written in the forms UPSC uses, mostly statements to judge rather than one-line facts. Each has exactly one defensible answer, and its explanation takes each statement in turn.
Pictures
The picture at the top of a story is an illustration of its subject, made with an AI image tool. It is not a photograph of the event. Our pictures show no text, logos, flags or recognisable people, and never an invented scene made to look like a photograph of the event.