SSC GD Constable Course

SSC GD Constable: Exam Structure, PST/PET and a Marking-Based Strategy

SSC GD Constable is the recruitment examination the Staff Selection Commission runs for the General Duty cadre: Constable (GD) in the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) and the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSF), Rifleman (GD) in the Assam Rifles, and Sepoy in the Narcotics Control Bureau. Unlike SSC's graduate-level examinations, GD Constable has no written Tier-II and no interview. A candidate clears one Computer Based Examination, then a Physical Efficiency Test and Physical Standard Test conducted by the recruiting forces themselves, then a medical examination and document verification. This chapter reads that pipeline the way the notice actually writes it, works through the arithmetic a candidate needs on exam day and on the running track, and closes with a study and fitness plan that uses the rest of this book. Every pattern figure here is drawn from the Commission's GD 2026 notice and cited to its paragraph; where a new cycle's notice might change a number, this chapter says so plainly instead of pretending 2026's numbers are fixed for all time.

KarmSakha preparation topics covered

• Which posts this examination fills, and the four-stage pipeline that leads from the Computer Based Examination to an appointment order
• The Computer Based Examination: one 80-question paper, four parts, marking scheme, medium of the paper and question level
• The arithmetic of the 0.25 negative mark, what a blank answer costs compared with a wrong one, and when a guess is worth making
• Minimum qualifying marks by category, and how NCC incentive marks are added to merit without changing that qualifying line
• The Physical Efficiency Test (PET): race distances and time limits for men and women, on the plains and in the Ladakh region
• The Physical Standard Test (PST): height, chest and weight standards, and the category-wise relaxations to each
• What happens after PET/PST clears: shortlisting ratios, the medical examination and document verification
• Turning the pattern into a time budget for the paper and a realistic run-up plan for the physical tests

One Examination, Four Posts, No Interview

The GD 2026 notice recruits for four kinds of posts under one common examination: Constable (General Duty) in seven Central Armed Police Forces and the Sashastra Seema Bal, Rifleman (General Duty) in the Assam Rifles, and Sepoy in the Narcotics Control Bureau. All of them are General Duty combatant posts, which is why the recruitment standards you will read in this chapter — the race, the height and chest measurements — apply across all of them rather than varying post by post the way pay levels do in a graduate-level exam. A candidate fills one application, sits one Computer Based Examination, and is then processed through the same physical and medical pipeline regardless of which of these forces eventually appoints them.

The selection pipeline itself is short by SSC standards: Computer Based Examination (CBE), Physical Efficiency Test and Physical Standard Test (PET/PST), Detailed Medical Examination and Document Verification (DME/DV), and — only for those provisionally selected after all of that — a Review Medical Examination if they choose to contest an unfit finding. There is no separate descriptive paper, no Tier-II, and no interview anywhere in the process; merit is decided by the CBE score (adjusted for normalisation and NCC bonus marks where applicable), and everything after the CBE is qualifying rather than merit-deciding, in the sense that a candidate either meets the physical and medical standard or does not.

This matters for how you should read the rest of this book. Chapters 2 to 5 build the syllabus that decides your CBE score and therefore your rank; chapters 6 to 8 do the same for General Knowledge, English and Hindi. Chapter 9 covers General Hindi for readers attempting the paper in that medium. Chapter 10 covers the PST/PET medical standards and document-verification list in the depth this chapter deliberately does not, and closes with a final revision pass.

One more point before the pattern itself: SSC's GD recruitment happens in named cycles — GD 2018, GD 2021, GD 2022, GD 2024, GD 2026 and so on — each with its own notice, and each notice is capable of changing a number this chapter quotes. As of 27 September 2026, when this chapter was written, the GD 2026 notice (published 01.12.2025) was the most recent one on the Commission's website, and a GD 2027 cycle was being reported by exam-news sites as expected to open around the end of September 2026 but had not yet been notified. Treat every number below as 'GD 2026, as things stand' and re-check it against the live notice on ssc.gov.in before you rely on it for an exam-day or training decision.

The Computer Based Examination: One Paper, Four Parts

The Computer Based Examination is a single Objective Type paper of 80 questions, every question worth 2 marks, for a maximum of 160 marks. The paper is split into four parts of exactly 20 questions each: Part A is General Intelligence and Reasoning, Part B is General Knowledge and General Awareness, Part C is Elementary Mathematics, and Part D is English or Hindi. Each part therefore carries 40 marks, and the whole paper is completed inside a single 60-minute window — there is no separate timer per part, so a candidate who finishes Part A in eight minutes carries the remaining time into the rest of the paper.

Every question is Objective Multiple-Choice, and the notice states plainly that questions are of Matriculation level — that is, up to what a Class 10 board syllabus would expect, not graduate or even Class 12 level. This is worth taking seriously rather than as a throwaway line: it means the Elementary Mathematics part will not ask you for calculus or coordinate geometry, and the General Knowledge part is drawing on the kind of general-science and social-science content a Class 10 student is expected to know, not specialist current-affairs trivia. Chapters 2, 3, 6 and 7 are built to that ceiling deliberately.

The examination is offered in English, Hindi, and 13 regional languages named in the notice — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu — which means a candidate can choose to attempt the paper in the language they read fastest in, and English fluency by itself is not the gate for the other three parts; Part D is where the language skill itself is being tested. No calculators or other electronic gadgets are permitted in the examination hall.

Because the four parts are fixed at 20 questions and 40 marks each, a candidate's score is really the sum of four independent 40-mark efforts, and a weak part cannot be quietly made up by an unusually strong one in the way it might be in a paper with a single combined section — 20 questions is a small enough sample that a candidate who skips an entire part loses a flat 40 marks of ceiling, not merely 'some marks'. That is the practical reason this book gives Elementary Mathematics two full chapters and reasoning two full chapters: neither part can be treated as a rounding error against the other three.

Negative Marking: What a Wrong Answer Costs, and When a Guess Is Worth It

Every wrong answer costs a flat 0.25 marks, regardless of which part the question is in — this is not a fraction of that question's 2-mark value, it is a fixed 0.25-mark deduction stated directly in the notice. An unattempted question costs nothing at all. So if C is the number of questions you get right and W is the number you get wrong, your net score is Net = 2C − 0.25W, out of a possible 160. Unattempted questions simply do not appear in this formula; they neither add nor subtract.

This ratio of reward to penalty — 2 marks for a correct answer against a 0.25-mark penalty for a wrong one, a ratio of 8 to 1 — is unusually forgiving compared with many other objective examinations, where the penalty is often one-third or one-quarter of the question's own mark value (which would make the ratio 3 to 1 or 4 to 1). It is worth working out exactly what that means for whether a blind guess among the paper's multiple-choice options is, on average, worth making.

Suppose a question offers n equally likely options and you have no idea which is correct, so you pick one at random. The chance you are right is 1/n, in which case you gain 2 marks; the chance you are wrong is (n−1)/n, in which case you lose 0.25 marks. The expected value of that guess is EV(n) = (2/n) − 0.25 × (n−1)/n, and this number is positive exactly when 2 > 0.25(n − 1), which simplifies to n < 9. In other words, under this exact marking scheme, a completely uninformed guess has positive expected value for any question with 8 or fewer options, is exactly neutral at 9 options, and only turns into an expected loss once a question has 10 or more options.

A four-option multiple-choice question, which is the standard format you should expect, sits well inside that positive-expected-value zone: a pure guess is worth +0.3125 marks on average. That does not mean guessing beats knowing the answer — knowing the answer is worth 2 marks with certainty, which is always better than a 0.3125-mark average — and it says nothing about any one question in isolation, only about the average over many guesses. What it does mean, honestly, is that under this specific 2-mark-correct, 0.25-mark-wrong scheme, leaving a question fully blank when you cannot eliminate even one option is the mathematically worse choice compared with taking your best guess, which is the opposite of the advice that applies to many other negative-marking exams where the penalty is much steeper relative to the reward.

None of this is an argument for carelessness. Eliminating even one wrong option before guessing raises your effective odds from 1-in-4 to 1-in-3 and pushes the expected value of that guess up further; eliminating two options raises it to 1-in-2. The arithmetic above describes the floor — a totally uninformed guess — not a target to aim for. Time spent actually learning the content in chapters 2 to 8 will always beat time spent reasoning about guessing odds; this section exists so that, on the small number of questions where you are genuinely stuck with seconds to spare, you know which choice the arithmetic favours.

Minimum Qualifying Marks and the NCC Incentive

Not every candidate who sits the CBE is shortlisted for PET/PST — each candidate must first clear a minimum qualifying mark that depends on category: 30% of the maximum marks for Unreserved (UR) candidates, 25% for OBC and EWS candidates, and 20% for all other categories (SC, ST and the remaining reserved categories the notice groups together). Out of a maximum of 160, that works out to 48 marks for UR, 40 marks for OBC/EWS, and 32 marks for the remaining categories. The notice is explicit that this minimum-qualifying check is applied without adding NCC bonus marks — it is a raw-score gate, applied before any incentive is added.

NCC Certificate holders separately receive an incentive added to their normalised CBE score once they clear the minimum-qualifying gate: 5% of the Examination's maximum marks for an NCC 'C' Certificate, 3% for a 'B' Certificate, and 2% for an 'A' Certificate. This bonus is provisional on the claim made in the online application and is confirmed only when the original certificate is produced at Document Verification; a candidate who claims an NCC certificate they cannot then produce has the provisional bonus withdrawn. The bonus also does not apply to Ex-servicemen candidates.

The distinction between these two numbers is easy to blur and worth stating precisely: the minimum-qualifying percentage decides whether you are in the pool considered for shortlisting at all, using your raw CBE marks; the NCC bonus is added afterwards, to your normalised score, and only changes where you rank within that pool for the PET/PST call — it cannot rescue a candidate who fell short of the raw qualifying mark in the first place, because that gate is checked before the bonus exists.

Shortlisting itself, once a candidate clears the qualifying mark, is done state-wise, area-wise and category-wise by merit in the CBE (including NCC bonus marks where applicable) — so a candidate's competition is really against other candidates of the same category applying against the same state or area's vacancies, not against the entire all-India applicant pool undifferentiated.

The Physical Efficiency Test (PET): The Race

Candidates who clear the CBE and its minimum-qualifying mark are shortlisted for the Physical Efficiency Test and Physical Standard Test, which the CAPFs — not the Commission — conduct at centres they finalise. On reporting, candidates go through biometric verification and then PET and PST. Ex-servicemen are exempt from actually running the PET race, though they still have their height, chest and weight measured for the record and must still clear the medical examination.