What the CEE is
The Common Entrance Examination, written throughout as the CEE, is the Indian Army's written stage for Agniveer recruitment. It is a computer-based paper, sat before the recruitment rally at which the physical tests, document checking and medical examination take place.
VSVSV is a private learning platform. It is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by the Ministry of Defence, the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, the Indian Air Force, or any recruiting body. We do not conduct, influence, or take part in recruitment or selection. This article is study material. It is not a recruitment notification. It confers no entitlement of any kind.
Everything below is read from the ARO rally notifications for the 2027 intake — two independent notifications, cross-checked against each other, carrying identical clauses.
Length
Under the ARO rally notifications for the 2027 intake, a candidate answers fifty questions in one hour.
Under the ARO rally notifications for the 2027 intake, a candidate who has applied for two Agniveer categories answers one hundred questions in two hours — and it is important to understand what that is. It is not a longer paper. It is two separate CEEs, one per category, sat in one sitting.
Sections
The section split depends on the category applied for, and under the published syllabus documents for the current cycle there are three shapes. In outline:
- General Duty, Tradesmen and Women Military Police — General Knowledge 15, General Science 15, Mathematics 15, Logical Reasoning 5.
- Technical — General Knowledge and Reasoning 10 as one section, Mathematics 15, Physics 15, Chemistry 10.
- Clerk / Store Keeper Technical — Part I of General Knowledge 5, General Science 5, Mathematics 10 and Computer Science 5; Part II of General English 25.
We have a separate article on the categories and what each requires.
Marking — read this section before you read anything else on the subject
Under the ARO rally notifications for the 2027 intake, the marking rule is a three-item list and none of the three is a deduction.
- Full marks for every correct answer.
- Nil marks for an unattempted question.
- All questions, if attempted, are considered for evaluation, even if marked for review.
Under the notifications for the current cycle, no negative marking is stated — that sentence is worded carefully, and the care matters. What we can report is that the notifications state no deduction. We stop short of writing "there is no negative marking" as a fact about the examination. An absence of a statement is not the same thing as a statement of absence, and only the recruiting authority can settle which this is.
And here is why almost everything else you will read on this disagrees
Earlier cycles did deduct — an Army recruiting notification of February 2024 stated, in terms, that twenty-five per cent of a question's marks would be deducted for every wrong answer. That was real, it was official, and it was correctly quoted.
The clause was removed for recruiting year 2025-26 — A notification of March 2025 carries a three-item marking rule with no deduction in it, as do the notifications for the current cycle.
So the widely repeated figures — half a mark off for General Duty, one mark off for Technical and Clerk — are arithmetic done correctly on a clause that was withdrawn two cycles ago. The sources repeating them are not inventing anything. They are simply out of date, and an out-of-date figure looks exactly like a current one.
The practical instruction: read the marking clause of the notification you are actually sitting under, and read it every cycle. Whether a wrong answer costs you anything is the single fact that most changes how you should attempt a paper, and it is a fact that has already moved once.
Languages — the widest of the three services
Under the same notifications, the CEE is conducted in thirteen languages: English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Odia, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and Assamese.
This is not a bilingual paper. It is the widest language provision of the three services, and it is worth a candidate's attention because sitting a paper in the language you think in is a real advantage that costs nothing. We have a separate article on sitting the CEE in your own language.
Normalisation
Under the same notifications, marks are normalised to allow for difficulty varying between sittings.
Two consequences follow, and both are worth being blunt about.
A raw practice score is not a normalised score — nobody outside the recruiting authority can reproduce a normalisation, because it depends on the population sitting each session. Any practice platform reporting a score — ours included — is reporting a raw score. We say so rather than implying otherwise.
A cut-off is not a fixed pass mark — the notifications set the merit against the vacancies available rather than against a fixed threshold, so the number that clears in one ARO in one cycle tells you very little about another.
The typing test
Under the same notifications, candidates for Clerk / Store Keeper Technical take a typing test during the online CEE. The standard named is thirty words per minute in English, which the notification describes as desirable. Only candidates who qualify proceed.
If you are applying for Clerk / Store Keeper Technical, this is a component you can prepare for directly and cheaply, and it is one that candidates routinely discover on the day.
What the notifications do NOT say
We are listing these because most material on the CEE fills these gaps with figures, and a filled gap reads exactly like a verified fact.
- Marks per question are absent from every document we have read — under the ARO rally notifications for the 2027 intake the CEE carries a maximum of 200 marks, and the syllabus documents for the current cycle give 50 questions. Dividing one by the other is arithmetic we did, rather than a figure the Army published, so we leave it out.
- No sectional qualifying rule is stated for the Army — neither notification sets one, and neither sets a pass mark. That is consistent with normalisation and a vacancy-proportionate cut-off rather than with a fixed threshold.
- The Logical Reasoning section has no published topic list — the Pattern table names four sections; the Syllabus beneath it scopes three. We have a separate article on what that means for preparation.
What to do
- Read your own ARO's notification, not a summary and not another ARO's.
- Find the marking clause and read it for yourself — it is the clause most likely to have moved and the one that most changes how you attempt the paper.
- Choose your language deliberately rather than defaulting to English because the practice material is in English.
- Treat every practice score as a raw score — it is one.
Related reading
- Marking Across the Three Services — and the Year the Army Withdrew Its Deduction
- You Can Sit the Army CEE in Thirteen Languages — and Most Candidates Do Not Know It
- The Army Agniveer General Duty Syllabus — What Is Published, Verbatim
- Applying for Two Army Categories — What the Notification Allows, and What It Costs You on the Day
This article is general guidance written from publicly available recruitment notifications and scheme documents issued by the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, the Indian Air Force and the Ministry of Defence. Eligibility, exam patterns, physical standards, pay and scheme terms are revised with each recruitment cycle, and every figure stated here is pinned to the cycle it was read from. Always confirm current specifics against the live notification on the official portal of the service you are applying to. VSVSV is a private learning platform. It is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by the Ministry of Defence, the Indian Armed Forces, or any recruiting body. It takes no part in recruitment or selection.