For How Many Years Should You Solve PYQs?

For most objective, Prelims-style competitive exams, solving the last 10 to 15 years of PYQs thoroughly gives you a reliable, representative picture of what's typically asked. This window is usually long enough to reveal recurring topics and question styles without wasting time on papers that no longer reflect the current pattern.

Five years is too short a sample. Many important themes don't appear every single year — they cycle back every few years — so restricting yourself to a narrow window means missing topics that are still very much in scope, just not recently asked.

Exams evolve. UPSC Prelims, for example, changed meaningfully after 2011 with the introduction of CSAT and a shift toward more analytical, statement-based questions. Papers from well before a major pattern shift are less representative of what you'll actually face — treat very old papers as a bonus layer for topic-frequency insight, not your primary practice set.

A tiered approach works well for most aspirants:

Newer exams, or those with recent syllabus changes, may only have a few genuinely comparable years of papers — in that case, solve everything available rather than chasing a specific number. On PYQ Mitra, you can browse each exam's practice sets by year to quickly see how much history is available and work backward from there.