MP Police Constable Course 2026

Exam Pattern, Strategy and PST/PET Standards

MP Police Constable (GD) recruitment is run in two stages by two different bodies. The Madhya Pradesh Employees Selection Board (MPESB) conducts stage 1, a single online objective written exam; the Police Department itself then conducts stage 2, the Physical Efficiency Test, Physical Standard Test, document verification and medical examination for whoever qualifies. Both stages are governed by one rule book that the Police Headquarters issues fresh for each recruitment cycle, and every number in this chapter is read directly from the 2026 cycle's rule book (dated 09-09-2026), not from a coaching-site summary. That matters because several of these numbers are genuinely different from what candidates preparing from an older cycle, or from a different state's police exam, would expect: this exam carries no negative marking, its physical scoring is a printed table rather than a simple pass/fail bar, and its age relaxations do not simply add together. Getting the mechanics of the exam right is a precondition for using the rest of this book well, so this chapter works through the written exam's structure, the PST and PET standards, and the eligibility rules in the order a candidate actually needs them.

KarmSakha preparation topics covered

• The recruitment pipeline: MPESB's online written exam (stage 1) followed by the Police Department's Physical Efficiency Test, Physical Standard Test, document verification and medical exam (stage 2)
• The written paper's exact structure: 100 objective questions, 100 marks, 2 hours, three named and weighted sections, and the marking scheme (including whether wrong answers cost anything)
• How the cut-off percentile and the 7-times call-up rule decide who is invited to the physical stage
• Physical Standard Test (PST): height and chest standards for the Special Armed Force cadre and for other General Duty cadres, by category and sex
• Physical Efficiency Test (PET): the three events, how each is scored, and the minimum PET mark needed to stay in contention
• Age, education, domicile and fee eligibility, including how multiple age relaxations combine
• Medical standards, character verification, and what happens between the merit list and appointment
• The current (2026) notification's vacancy count and dates, read as time-stamped facts rather than permanent ones

One Recruitment, Two Cadres, Two Stages

The 2026 Constable (GD) recruitment advertises two cadres under one notice: Constable (General Duty) for the Special Armed Force, commonly written SAF, with 700 posts, and Constable (General Duty) for cadres other than the Special Armed Force, with 6,800 posts, for a combined 7,500 vacancies. The SAF cadre is open to male candidates only; the other GD cadres are open to both male and female candidates, with 35% of those posts horizontally reserved for women. A candidate can express a preference between the two cadres and among the state's administrative units at the time of application, but final unit allotment is made by the Police Department according to its own requirement, not purely by candidate preference.

Stage 1 is a computer-based online examination that MPESB conducts and scores. Only candidates who clear stage 1 by the cut-off percentile for their category are called forward to stage 2. Stage 2 combines the Physical Efficiency Test (PET) and Physical Standard Test (PST), followed by scrutiny of every original certificate the candidate holds — educational, caste/category, domicile, ex-serviceman or home guard status, age-relaxation proofs — at the same physical centre. A candidate who is found ineligible at document scrutiny is dropped from the process regardless of how well they performed in the written exam or the physical tests.

Only candidates who hold a Madhya Pradesh domicile certificate can claim any reservation (SC/ST/OBC/EWS) or any age relaxation. A candidate without MP domicile may still apply, but only under the unreserved, open category, with no benefit of relaxed age or relaxed physical standards of any kind.

The Current 2026 Notification: Dates and Status

As of 27 September 2026, the online application window for this cycle runs from 22 September 2026 to 6 October 2026, with a correction window for already-submitted applications open from 22 September to 11 October 2026. The rule book lists the written exam's probable start date as 19 November 2026, run in two shifts on each exam day: a first shift with candidate reporting from 8:00 am and answer-marking from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon, and a second shift with reporting from 1:00 pm and answer-marking from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Both shifts get a ten-minute window beforehand to read the exam's standing instructions.

MPESB labels this exam date 'संभावित', meaning probable rather than fixed. The rule book itself reserves the right to preserve, advance or postpone this date without a fresh round of applications, and states that if the exam runs across more than one shift, candidate scores are normalised across shifts before the merit list is prepared — a standard statistical adjustment for the fact that no two shifts of an objective exam are ever exactly equally difficult, not a sign that the exam changed after the fact.

A candidate's Aadhaar registration is mandatory, and biometric verification (fingerprint or similar) is taken both at entry to the exam and during the exam itself; a candidate whose Aadhaar cannot be verified, or who arrives after the reporting window closes, is not permitted to sit the exam at all, independent of anything to do with the syllabus.

The Written Examination: Structure, Sections and Marking

The written exam is a single question paper of 100 objective (multiple-choice) questions worth 100 marks, to be completed in 2 hours, conducted entirely in the Hindi language. The rule book states that every question is set to the level of Class 8 under the Madhya Pradesh Board of Secondary Education — a level worth taking seriously as a study target in its own right, because over-preparing with materials pitched at a harder competitive exam wastes time that would be better spent on speed and accuracy at the exam's actual difficulty.

The 100 marks are split across three named sections. Two of those section names bundle together skills that this book teaches as separate chapters for clarity, but they are marked as one combined score by MPESB, not as three independent papers: a wrong answer in the 'reasoning' half of section one still counts against the same 40-mark pool as a wrong answer in the 'general knowledge' half.

Marking is refreshingly simple by the standards of most competitive objective exams: a correct answer earns +1 mark, and a wrong or unattempted answer earns exactly 0 — there is no negative marking of any kind on this paper. That single fact changes exam-day strategy more than any syllabus detail: because a wrong guess costs nothing, there is no scenario on this specific paper where leaving a question blank beats attempting it, even as a pure guess with no elimination at all. A blind guess among four options has, on average, a one-in-four chance of adding a mark and zero chance of subtracting one, which makes its expected value strictly positive; the only genuinely costly choice is time spent on one question that could have been spent attempting several easier ones.

Minimum Qualifying, the Merit List and the 7-Times Call-up Rule

MPESB does not fix a flat minimum-marks cut-off for the written exam the way some exams publish, say, '35% to qualify'. Instead, within each vertical reservation category — unreserved, SC, ST, OBC and EWS — candidates are ranked by percentile score, and a cut-off percentile is set for that category once the written exam is over. Everyone at or above that percentile in their own category, plus every candidate whose percentile exceeds their own category's cut-off but who chose that category on the application (candidates are always free to compete in the unreserved pool on their own percentile, since the unreserved category is open competition, not a category reserved for any one group), is called forward.

Within each vertical category, the number of candidates called forward for the PET/PST stage is seven times the number of vacancies advertised for that category — the rule book calls this the 'सात गुना' (seven-times) rule. If the exact cut-off percentile is shared by more candidates than seven times the vacancy count, every one of those tied candidates is still called forward rather than being arbitrarily cut off, so the true number called can exceed seven times the posts in a given cycle. Horizontal categories layered inside a vertical category — women, home guards, ex-servicemen — do not get their own separate cut-off percentile; they are picked from within their vertical category's already-qualified pool.

Clearing the cut-off percentile only earns an invitation to the PET/PST stage — it is not, by itself, a place on the final merit list. The final merit list is prepared only after both stages are complete, precisely as described in the next section.

Physical Standard Test (PST): Height and Chest

PST standards differ by cadre and, for men, by a further sub-classification the rule book calls a category group. For the Special Armed Force (SAF) cadre, which accepts male candidates only, the height and chest requirements are relaxed for candidates from certain communities and states of origin, reflecting the same relaxed-standards approach used across India's paramilitary and armed police recruitment for these specific groups. For every other General Duty cadre, the standards are simpler: one height/chest table for general and OBC male candidates, a second for SC male candidates, a third for ST male candidates, and a single height figure for women with no chest measurement requirement at all, since chest expansion is not assessed for women candidates under this rule book.

Wherever a chest measurement standard applies, it is stated as two numbers — an unexpanded measurement and an expanded measurement — and the rule book separately requires that the difference between the two, the actual expansion achieved on the day, be at least 5 centimetres. This is stated as its own condition, independent of whether the unexpanded and expanded readings individually clear their respective minimums: a candidate whose raw numbers both pass but whose lungs only expand the chest by 4 centimetres still fails the standard, because the minimum expansion condition is checked on its own.

For a transgender candidate, the applicable standard (male or female) follows whichever gender is recorded on the Certificate of Identity issued by the relevant District Magistrate, and the same certificate is used to decide which category's height/chest table applies.

Physical Efficiency Test (PET): Events and Scoring

PET is worth 100 marks in total, split across three events: an 800-metre race (maximum 40 marks), a standing long jump (maximum 30 marks) and a shot put (maximum 30 marks; men throw a 7.26 kg shot, women a 4.00 kg shot). A candidate gets exactly one attempt at the 800-metre race and up to three attempts each at the long jump and the shot put, with the best of those attempts counted.

Every event is scored off a printed table (Schedule 1 of the rule book) rather than a formula: each achieved time or distance maps to a specific mark from 0 up to the event's maximum, separately tabulated for men and women. At the bottom of the scale, a men's 800-metre time of more than 198.3 seconds earns 0 marks for that event, and a women's time of more than 261.8 seconds earns 0; at the top, a men's time under 124.2 seconds earns the full 40, and a women's time under 176 seconds earns the full 40. The long jump and shot put follow the identical shape — a slowest/shortest threshold below which the event is worth 0, and a fastest/longest threshold at or beyond which it is worth the event's full maximum, with a graded scale of intermediate marks in between.

A separate, more lenient version of the same three-event table applies only to home guards and ex-servicemen sitting under their own relaxed-standards route; it does not apply to any other candidate, and using its thresholds for a general-category or reserved-category candidate who is not a home guard or ex-serviceman would understate what that candidate actually needs to clear.

PET marks are not merely a qualifying hurdle: a candidate's PET score is added directly to the written exam score to build the final merit list, but only after a floor is cleared. Every Constable (GD) candidate, in every category, must score at least 30 out of the 100 available PET marks to remain in contention; scoring below that floor removes a candidate from the merit list regardless of how strong their written score or their PET score on any single event was.

Eligibility: Age, Education, Domicile and Fee