Army GD Agniveer Course

Exam Pattern, Agnipath Scheme & Physical Standards

Agniveer General Duty recruitment is not decided by one exam. A candidate has to clear an online written test, a physical fitness test measured against a fixed timing table, a physical measurement against a height-weight-chest standard, an adaptability screening, and a medical examination — and for General Duty specifically, the written score and the physical-fitness score both feed into the same merit list. Most study material treats the physical and medical requirements as a footnote to the syllabus. This chapter treats them as what they are: exactly as much a part of clearing this exam as the mathematics chapter is, with the same expectation that every number here is checked, not guessed at. Every figure in this chapter is drawn from an official Indian Army syllabus document or recruitment notification, named where it is used, because the Agnipath scheme's exact numbers have been revised before and will likely be revised again — the discipline of checking the source is worth more than any single number memorised today.

KarmSakha preparation topics covered

• What the Agnipath scheme is and what four years of Agniveer service actually involves
• The two-phase selection sequence: Phase I online Common Entrance Examination, Phase II recruitment rally
• The official CEE pattern for Soldier/Agniveer General Duty: subjects, questions, marks and pass marks
• How the online CEE is actually run: languages, fee, marking rule, score normalisation
• The Physical Fitness Test: 1.6 km run groups, pull-ups, 9-feet ditch, zig-zag balance, hilly-terrain allowances
• Physical standards: the height-weight-chest table, special-category relaxations, and how to read the weight chart
• The Adaptability Test, medical examination and document verification that follow a cleared PFT
• Bonus marks (NCC, sportsmen, service kin) and how General Duty's merit differs from Technical/Clerk merit
• The Indian Armed Forces as a General Knowledge topic: the three services, the Chief of Defence Staff, rank structures, Army commands, officer training institutions, and the gallantry-award hierarchy

What Agnipath and Agniveer Service Actually Involve

The Agnipath scheme enrols candidates into the Indian Army as Agniveers for a fixed engagement period of four years, under the Indian Army Act 1950. Agniveer is a distinct rank, separate from the ranks that existed in the Army before the scheme — it is not simply a probationary label attached to the old Sepoy rank. During the four years, an Agniveer draws a package that rises each year (a fixed yearly increment on top of Risk and Hardship, Dress and Travel allowances) and is enrolled for training and duties at the Army's discretion; the Army is not obliged to specify in advance which unit, arm or duty an Agniveer will be assigned to beyond their recruited category.

The most consequential clause of the scheme for someone planning a career, rather than just clearing an exam, is what happens at the end of the four years. The Army reviews performance during the engagement period against centralised, objective criteria, and up to 25% of each batch of Agniveers is offered the chance to apply for permanent enrolment into the regular cadre. Being offered a chance to apply is not the same as being guaranteed permanent service — the recruitment notification is explicit that an Agniveer has no right to be selected for further enrolment, and that any further selection is entirely at the Army's discretion. A prospectus, coaching centre or advertisement that promises guaranteed permanent absorption after four years is not describing the scheme as the Army's own notification describes it.

Agniveers do not contribute to a Provident Fund and are not covered by the pension regulations that apply to regular Army personnel; there is no gratuity or pensionary benefit tied to the engagement. What replaces that structure is the Seva Nidhi package: a monthly contribution from the Agniveer's own package (30% of the customised package, deducted before the 70% 'in hand' portion is paid) matched rupee-for-rupee by the Government, accumulated across the four years and paid out as a lump sum on completion of the engagement period. A worked example later in this chapter reconstructs the exact corpus this produces from the published monthly figures, because the arithmetic is a genuinely useful thing to be able to verify rather than take on faith from a recruitment poster.

Two other terms of service are worth knowing before anything about the exam itself: only unmarried candidates are eligible for enrolment, and an Agniveer who marries during the four-year engagement period is released from service; and Agniveers are not granted Ex-Servicemen status at the end of their engagement, which is a different entitlement structure from what applied to soldiers recruited before the scheme. Both of these are terms-of-service facts, not exam-content facts, but a candidate deciding whether and when to apply should know them going in rather than discovering them after enrolment.

The Two-Phase Selection Sequence

Selection runs in two phases. Phase I is the online Common Entrance Examination (CEE), held at computer-based test centres allotted to each candidate; Phase II is the recruitment rally, run by Army Recruiting Offices at a physical rally venue, and it is where the Physical Fitness Test, physical measurement, Adaptability Test, medical examination and document verification all happen. A candidate only reaches Phase II by clearing Phase I and appearing in the merit list published against the CEE result — the two phases are sequential, not a menu a candidate can attempt in either order.

Registration for a recruiting cycle opens online through joinindianarmy.nic.in, where a candidate creates a profile, checks their own eligibility, and fills in their educational qualification and category. An examination fee is charged per category applied for (as per the RY 2025-26 notification, this was Rs 250 per category, paid through a payment gateway, net banking or UPI); a candidate may apply for up to two categories in the same cycle if they meet the eligibility for both, but must then sit a separate CEE for each category chosen. Candidates must also choose an exam centre from five ranked preferences — the notification is explicit that the Army may allot a centre outside those preferences 'due to administrative restrictions', so a candidate should not assume their first-choice city.

Entry to the CEE venue itself follows a fixed sequence: frisking at the entry gate, checking of the admit card and Aadhaar card, automatic allotment of the exam hall, attendance marking, biometric capture (iris and thumb impression) inside the hall, login to the allotted terminal, the test itself, and an exit biometric capture before leaving. No electronic gadgets are permitted inside. Gates open one and a half hours before the scheduled time and close thirty minutes before it — arriving after the gate closes means missing that sitting entirely, with no provision to reschedule.

The CEE itself is conducted in thirteen languages (English, Hindi, and eleven other scheduled languages), and a candidate chooses their preferred language when appearing. Scores from the online test are normalised across candidates to account for difficulty variation between different exam sessions and centres — this is a standard statistical adjustment used whenever a computer-based test runs across many sittings rather than one common paper, and it means the 'raw' number of correct answers is not necessarily the number that ends up on the merit list.

• Phase I: Online CEE at a computer-based test centre — subject-wise MCQs, full marks for a correct answer, no marks deducted for an unattempted question
• Merit list published from the normalised CEE score; only candidates within it are called for Phase II
• Phase II, stage 1: Physical Fitness Test (1.6 km run, pull-ups, 9-feet ditch, zig-zag balance)
• Phase II, stage 2: Physical Measurement Test against the height-weight-chest standard
• Phase II, stage 3: Adaptability Test, conducted on a tablet or mobile device
• Phase II, stage 4: Medical examination by an Army medical team, with a review option at a military/base/command hospital for a candidate declared unfit at the rally site
• Document verification runs alongside Phase II: education certificates, domicile, caste/religion certificates where applicable, police character certificate, school character certificate, unmarried certificate, and (for eligible categories) relationship or NCC/sports certificates for bonus marks

The CEE Pattern for Soldier/Agniveer General Duty

The official syllabus document for Soldier General Duty sets out exactly three subjects in the written test, not four. This matters because a good deal of material aimed at this exam — and, for that matter, the working assumption this course itself started from before the source document was checked — describes a fourth section called Reasoning, scored separately from General Knowledge, General Science and Mathematics. The syllabus document does not contain that fourth row. What it contains is reproduced in the table below exactly as published.

General Knowledge carries 15 questions for 30 marks, General Science carries 20 questions for 40 marks, and Mathematics carries 15 questions for 30 marks, for a total of 50 questions and 100 marks. Look at the marks-per-question ratio in each row rather than the totals: 30 marks over 15 questions, 40 marks over 20 questions, and 30 marks over 15 questions are all exactly 2 marks per question. That is simple arithmetic on the published table, not a claim about how the exam is designed — every question in the CEE for General Duty is worth the same 2 marks regardless of which of the three subjects it comes from, and that fact is useful for planning how to spend time across the paper, which the next section works through numerically.

The same document lists a pass mark of 32, printed once in the pattern table rather than against each subject individually. Because of how that figure sits in the table, this course treats it as the overall qualifying aggregate out of 100 rather than a per-subject minimum, which is also how the figure is corroborated elsewhere — but the source document itself does not spell out the word 'aggregate', so treat this as the most reasonable reading of an official but slightly ambiguous table, and re-confirm it against your own cycle's notification rather than something to bank on unread. The same table's remarks column also notes that holders of an NCC 'C' Certificate are exempted — the document does not specify from which stage precisely, so do not assume it means 'exempted from the CEE altogether' without checking your own notification.

The written CEE is a computer-based, objective multiple-choice test. As per the recruitment notification, marking works on three rules: full marks for every correct answer, nil marks for an unattempted question, and every attempted question — including one a candidate marked for review and never revisited — is counted in the evaluation. There is no rule in either source document that deducts marks for a wrong answer; that is what 'no negative marking' means here, precisely, rather than a vaguer promise that 'guessing is safe'. A wrong guess costs nothing directly, but it also earns nothing, and the time spent on it is still gone.

The Physical Fitness Test: Run, Pull-Ups, Ditch and Balance

The Physical Fitness Test happens at the rally site during Phase II, and for General Duty it is not merely qualifying — the marks scored in the run and in pull-ups are added to the candidate's written CEE score to build the final merit list. (This is one of the two points in the whole process where General Duty's rules genuinely differ from Technical and Clerk/Store Keeper Technical, which is covered in the 'Bonus Marks and How General Duty's Merit Differs From Other Categories' section of this chapter — for those two categories the PFT is qualifying only and does not add marks.) The test has four components: the 1.6 km run, pull-ups on a beam, the 9-feet ditch jump, and the zig-zag balance.

The 1.6 km run is timed and grouped. A candidate who finishes at or under 5 minutes 30 seconds falls in Group I and earns 60 marks; from 5 minutes 31 seconds to 5 minutes 45 seconds is Group II, worth 48 marks; from 5 minutes 46 seconds to 6 minutes is Group III, worth 36 marks; and from 6 minutes 1 second to 6 minutes 15 seconds is Group IV, worth 24 marks. The recruitment notification itself carries a plain caution worth repeating rather than smoothing over: 'the timings for 1.6 km run and the marks assigned to the groups can be changed by the Indian Army at any stage before the recruitment rally' — so treat these four bands as the figures to train against today, and re-check the live notification close to your own rally date.

Pull-ups are marked on a separate scale that runs alongside the run groups rather than being tied to them: 10 pull-ups earns 40 marks, 9 earns 33, 8 earns 27, 7 earns 21, and 6 pull-ups is the minimum that earns any marks at all, worth 16. A candidate who cannot complete 6 pull-ups scores zero on this component; there is no partial credit below that floor. Notice that the gap between consecutive pull-up counts is not constant — 40 to 33 is a drop of 7, 33 to 27 is a drop of 6, 27 to 21 is a drop of 6, and 21 to 16 is a drop of 5 — so each extra pull-up above the minimum is worth a slightly different number of marks depending on where in the range it sits, which is worth knowing rather than assuming the scale is a flat 'X marks per pull-up' line.