6 questions about UPSC Section Officer / Stenographer Grade C — LDCE
It is the Limited Departmental Competitive Examination for Section Officer and Stenographer Grade C. Being an LDCE, it is a promotion examination written by serving government employees rather than an open-market recruitment exam. On RankRacer the exam is mapped to 6 subjects and 29 topics covering service rules, financial rules, office procedure, the RTI Act, and the Constitution and Parliament.
The question papers published for the 2024 cycle are Paper I, Paper II, and Paper III. Paper III is Noting, Drafting and Precis Writing. Paper II is set separately for each service category. The same three-paper structure appears in the papers published for earlier cycles going back to 2009–11. The number of questions, marks, and duration are fixed by the notification for each cycle and are not reproduced here.
Because Paper II is written for a specific service category. The 2024 cycle published separate Paper II papers for Categories I and VIII (Procedure and Practice), Category 2 (IFS), Category 3 (Railways), and Category 10 (AFHQ). Category-wise Paper II papers were also published for the 2014, 2016–17, 2018, 2019–20, 2021–22, and 2023 cycles. Check which category applies to your post before you practise from a past paper.
The published papers and cut-off documents are labelled by cycle, and several cover combined years — 2009–11, 2012–13, 2016–17, 2019–20, and 2021–22 — alongside single-year cycles 2014, 2015, 2018, 2023, and 2024. That describes the archive of past papers, not a fixed schedule: each cycle is announced by its own notification.
Six: Service Rules (7 topics, from the CCS Pension, Leave, Conduct, CCA and LTC Rules through the FR & SR and the POSH Act 2013), Financial Rules (6 topics, led by GFR 2017 and DFPR 2024), Office Procedure (5 topics, led by the CSMOP), RTI Act (5 topics), Constitution & Parliament (6 topics), and General English. General English has no topic breakdown mapped yet.
In the official notification issued for the cycle you intend to apply to. Eligibility (feeder grade, qualifying service, age), the number and marking of papers, and the exam calendar are all set there and change from cycle to cycle. This page covers only the syllabus map — RankRacer publishes a date or a marking rule only when it can cite an official notification for it.