CDS Exam is conducted by UPSC two times a year. It is an examination to recruit officers for the tri-services i.e. Army, Navy and Airforce based on a written exam followed by and Service Selection Board Interview of five days. Candidates must be curious to know the exam pattern for this test so given below is the examination pattern for the same:
- Papers: There are three papers in this exam. They are English, General Awareness and Mathematics. While the candidates applying for Permanent Commission in Army (IMA), Navy (NA) and Airforce (AFA) have to appear for all the three paper, candidates applying for Short Service Commission in Army (OTA) have to appear only for English and General Awareness Paper. Each paper has 120 questions.
- Duration: Each paper is of 2 hour duration.
- Marks: The maximum mark for each paper is 100. The candidates get 0.83 marks for each correct answer while 1/3rd of 0.83 marks are deducted for every wrong answer. No mark is deducted for a question left blank.
- Type of questions: The questions are objective by nature. Each question has four alternative out of which one is correct. The candidate has to mark the correct alternative by circling the oval in the OMR sheet.
- Syllabus:
- English: This is the first paper of the exam; it is an objective paper and consists of general English questions like on Passage etc. You can prepare antonyms, synonyms, sentence correction, questions on unseen paragraphs, error detection questions etc.
- General Knowledge: General Knowledge comprises of the toughest part of CDSE or any UPSC exam for that matter. In GK candidates are asked about the recent happenings (of around a period of one to one and a half year). Questions are asked from Polity, Geography, History, Science, Economy etc. You need to have a good understanding of the basics. You can refer to good books dedicated to CDS exam and to the mock and previous year’s papers to get a rough idea of GK and types of questions.
- Mathematics: You can refer to the article on syllabus of CDSE for details on Mathematics syllabus. As including the whole syllabus for mathematics is out of scope for this article.
- Interview: This is a personality test for which candidates who clear the written part are called. It is a process which is conducted in two stages which are Stage 1 or screening and the Stage 2. In Stage one candidate are put through a written reasoning test and Picture Perception and Discussion Test, based on which candidates are filtered for Stage 2. In stage two candidates are put through a series of test ranging from Psychological, Group Tests and personal Interview. You can refer to our website www.ssbcrack.com for details on specific test of SSB Interview.