CSS: A Graveyard of Buried Hopes

It is a popular belief that Tesla is the biggest producer of robots, but I’d argue that the CSS exam system is more deserving of this title. Since 1948, the exams have been conducted in Pakistan annually to select civil servants. The exams are the highlight of the year, as it is a high-stakes race in which almost 40,000 students compete for a minimum of 150 seats, and if luck is on their side, then 400 seats. Since its beginning, the exam system has produced more robots than bureaucrats.

In 2025, out of 25,000 candidates who applied for the exam, 15,000 were able to sit the written exam. I was one of them — whether that’s fortunate or not, only time will tell. The toughest part of the journey was getting started; the syllabus, which felt higher than Mount Everest, was a great source of demotivation.

Let’s start with English. I still have no idea what the examiner was expecting — did they want future bureaucrats to write official papers or 18th-century Shakespearean plays? What does frabjous even mean? I’ve been reading English books, including Shakespeare’s works, for over a decade, and I’ve never come across frabjous. Though to be fair, I did figure out the meaning of desiderium — only because I remembered the theme of a book with the same title I once read.

One question I’ve had since I started my preparation-or, rather, the lack thereof — is: What purpose does writing a 2500-word essay in three hours serve? Is the examiner trying to test the student’s knowledge, or are they simply looking to see if we have the power of what we might call, in Gen Z terms, ‘yapping’? It’s a funny word, but if you want to understand it, just listen to a speech from any Pakistani politician — that’s basically what they do. Yap. Just words. empty words.

Pakistan Affairs and Current Affairs were a fair game. They were important subjects, asking important questions. However, I did notice a pattern. Is Pakistan facing a crisis of national division based on ethnicity? Or was it just a hypothetical situation? Though to be honest, the former seems more likely than the latter.

I realised that memorisation is the key to this uncrackable exam. To pass Islamic studies, you need to have a really good memory to memorise all the facts, figures, and Quranic Verses.

During one of my papers, something the person sitting in front of me did left me a bit shocked. They spent the first 15 minutes skimming through the paper, and for the next hour or so, they focused solely on writing headings with a marker. The headings were so large that they had to request an extra answer sheet without even writing any substantial content. It wasn’t until they finished with the headings that they began writing proper answers. This made me wonder — had they memorised the headings beforehand, or was their preparation so thorough that reading the question twice gave them all the necessary details?

This was one of the things I often heard during my preparation: use a blue marker for headings, draw lines on both sides, write in big letters, leave space, and use as many pages as possible, do not choose science subjects. Oddly enough, I was asked to focus more on the presentation than the actual syllabus. I was also told to attempt the question I knew best first, follow it with my second best, then attempt the one I knew nothing about, and finally, the one I knew just enough of.

Does any of this matter? Does the examiner care more about presentation than content? Honestly, I wouldn’t blame them if they did — I’d also want some razzle-dazzle if I had to read the same answers over and over again. If these strategies make a difference, I’m sure I’ll be sitting for the exam again. I ignored all these tips the way people ignore the ‘I have read and agree’ box when signing up for a new app. The maximum number of pages I used was eighteen, and the least was eight, in my Physics exam. I’ll take the blame for that one.

I often heard that the CSS exam is one of the toughest to pass. I assumed it was because of the syllabus or the difficulty level of the questions, but that illusion shattered sooner than I expected. It’s not that the questions are impossible or the syllabus is unfamiliar; most of it is content the students have been studying since ninth grade, if not earlier.

What truly makes the exam challenging is the environment and timetable. Sitting through two three-hour exams a day, for six consecutive days, would break even the strongest minds. I was lucky to have two breaks between my exams, but the days with double papers drained me more than my entire A-level experience. The mental pressure and the lack of sleep took their toll — I almost skipped my physics exam because I simply didn’t have the patience or strength to continue the journey I had started. It was fear of humiliation and backhanded comments from my extended family that kept me going.

What is the true purpose behind these exams? I’m fairly certain it’s not to select the best and brightest of the country’s youth. If anything, the entire process seemed designed to filter out anyone who might challenge the system. It felt like they were looking for people who would say ‘yes, sir’ to their senior officers — those who wouldn’t question authority or push for real change. I hope that’s not true, though. After all, a government officer must serve the people of the country, not the current administration or those in power.

I first came across Karl Marx while preparing for my philosophy exam. He was, in my opinion, a pessimist — but an honest one. Among his many bleak observations, the one that resonates with me most is: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

Much like vampires, the CSS process seems to drain the financial resources of aspirants. From exam fees to the heavy costs of academies and books, an aspirant spends thousands — if not lacs — throughout the journey. And after all this, if they are not selected, they lose more than just hope; some even lose their lives. But then again, what is life without hope? Ironically, many of these expensive academies are run by the very bureaucrats who once sat in the same exam halls. Oh, the woes of a capitalist society.

In the end, the whole journey felt like being a robot on an assembly line, trained to be like all those who came before me. Mastering the tricks of the trade, rather than polishing my critical thinking and skills. But how long before this system, like so many others, collapses under its own weight? How long before it stops being one of the few seemingly honest processes left in Pakistan? The fiasco surrounding the 2024 written exam results and the protests that happened earlier this year indicate that the well-deserved downfall of this system might be closer than I once thought.

I want to conclude this with another quote that is often miscredited to Karl Marx: “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”