A Karnataka Armed Police Constable strategy measured from six real armed papers, 600 questions: 3,914 posts across four notifications, the true pattern, why Part A and Part B do not exist, and why volatility beats averages.
Karnataka Armed Police Constable selection turns on one written paper of 100 questions in 90 minutes, and that paper is not the Civil Police Constable paper under a different cover. This guide is built from the official notifications published on ksp-recruitment.in and from our own page by page reading of six real armed papers, 600 questions, counted head by head. The short version: the armed stream runs more general awareness, much less reasoning, more Karnataka, and a general science block that has swung between 7 and 32 questions.
There are 3,914 posts in the armed stream for 2026-27, advertised across four notifications that share one written scheme. The CAR and DAR notifications were issued on 19 June 2026 and the KSRP notifications on 10 July 2026, both by the Karnataka State Police, with the written exam conducted and evaluated by KEA, the Karnataka Examinations Authority.
| Notification | Post | Posts | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| 04/RECT-5(A) | Armed Police Constable, CAR and DAR, men | 1,421 | Residual |
| 04/RECT-5(B) | Armed Police Constable, CAR and DAR, men | 179 | Kalyana-Karnataka |
| 03/RECT-3(B) | Special Reserve Police Constable, KSRP, men and women | 1,455 | Residual |
| 07/RECT-3(B) | KSRP, KSISF and IRB | 859 | Kalyana-Karnataka |
The 859 posts in the last row break down as KSRP 334, KSISF 364 and IRB 161. CAR and DAR posts are for men only and IRB posts are for men only, while KSRP and KSISF posts are open to men and women. Applications for CAR and DAR ran from 22 June to 22 July 2026 with fee payment open to 24 July 2026, and for KSRP from 13 July to 10 August 2026 with fee payment open to 11 August 2026. The two groups apply through different KEA portals and sit on different dates, so they are two recruitments sharing one paper design rather than one recruitment.
As of 23 October 2026 the PST and PET schedule for the armed stream has not been announced. What has been published is who may attend: the PST and PET eligibility lists came out on 10 October 2026 for one notification group and on 18 October 2026 for the other, shortlisting candidates at a ratio of 1:10 on written marks. The dates themselves are still pending on ksp-recruitment.in.
| Stage | CAR and DAR | KSRP |
|---|---|---|
| Notification issued | 19 June 2026 | 10 July 2026 |
| Application window | 22 June to 22 July 2026 | 13 July to 10 August 2026 |
| Fee payable to | 24 July 2026 | 11 August 2026 |
| Kannada Language Test | 22 August 2026 | Not separately published |
| Written exam | 6 September 2026, 10:30 to 12:00 | 20 September 2026 |
| Provisional answer key | 7 September 2026 | 21 September 2026 |
| Written result | 11 September 2026 | 25 September 2026 |
| PST and PET eligibility list | 10 and 18 October 2026, in two waves | Not published as of 23 October 2026 |
| PST and PET dates | Not announced as of 23 October 2026 | Not announced as of 23 October 2026 |
For a sense of the wait involved, and explicitly not as a prediction, the civil stream's PST and PET ran from 28 September to 15 October 2026 in the same cycle. Treat that as a precedent for how long an eligibility list can sit before the ground tests begin, not as an armed date. Every site that prints a confident armed PST date today is guessing, and the practical consequence is the same either way: the notice period when it arrives will be short, so train now.
One objective written paper of 100 questions carrying 100 marks, answered in 90 minutes on an offline OMR sheet, with four options per question, 1 mark for a correct answer and 0.25 deducted for a wrong one. The scheme is identical for CAR, DAR, KSRP, KSISF and IRB posts, which is why one preparation plan serves all four notifications.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Structure | One undivided written paper, no sections printed |
| Questions and marks | 100 questions, 100 marks, 1 mark each |
| Duration | 90 minutes, one timer, no sectional lockout |
| Mode | Offline OMR |
| Options | 4 per question, confirmed on 600 of 600 questions counted |
| Negative marking | 0.25 for a wrong answer |
| Medium | Kannada and English |
| Kannada Language Test | Separate paper, qualifying only, 150 marks, 50 to qualify |
100 questions in 90 minutes is 54 seconds per question, so an item that takes two minutes is not this exam's item however correct your method is. The OMR sheet prints five circles per row and only the first four are answer options: the cover of the 20 September 2026 KSRP booklet says in English that the fifth circle is for an unanswered question. Anyone who counts circles on the sheet and reports five options has read the sheet, not the paper.
One honest gap. The civil stream's 2026 rule that a wholly blank row is itself penalised does not appear in any armed document we have read, so we do not claim it applies here and we do not claim it does not. The safe play costs nothing either way: shade the fifth circle for every question you leave alone.
No. The claim that the armed paper splits into a Part A for general knowledge and a Part B for mental ability circulates widely on secondary sites, and it is refuted twice over. Six real armed papers print no part heading, no section heading and no sub-total anywhere in the booklet. And the armed notification names the subjects as a flat list with no counts attached to any of them.
The subjects it names are general knowledge, science, geography, history, the Constitution of India, India's freedom struggle, general mental ability and moral education. That is a list, not a structure. Nobody can tell you how many questions each will carry in your paper, because the recruiting body has never said, and the six papers we counted disagree with one another by wide margins. What you can know is the measured range of each head, which is what the rest of this guide is about.
Measured across six armed papers against the civil stream's eleven, the armed paper carries more general awareness and less reasoning, a higher Karnataka share and a far more volatile science block. One of these gaps is small and one is enormous, and the enormous one is where a borrowed study plan comes apart.
| Measure | Armed stream | Civil stream |
|---|---|---|
| General awareness, per 100 | 88 | 86 |
| Reasoning, per 100 | 5 | 8 |
| Arithmetic, per 100 | 7 | 6 |
| Karnataka questions, mean | 16.2 | 12.3 |
| General science in one 2024 paper | 32 | 15 |
That last row is the one to sit with. The armed paper of 28 January 2024 ran 32 general science questions. The civil paper of 25 February 2024, five weeks later and built on the same template, ran 15. A candidate who had prepared the civil paper's science and walked into that armed paper found roughly a third of the booklet in a subject treated as a minor head. Our Civil Police Constable strategy guide covers the other stream in the same detail, and reading both is the cheapest way to see exactly where they part company.
These are our own counts, taken page by page from six real armed papers, 600 questions in total. Every paper's counts sum to exactly 100, which is the first check that they were counted rather than estimated. Nothing from any real paper is reproduced in our question bank: the papers were read for counts, difficulty and question format, and for nothing else.
| Paper | General awareness | Reasoning | Arithmetic | Karnataka | General science | Economy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DAR and CAR, 1 December 2019 | 90 | 5 | 5 | 16 | 9 | 2 |
| KSRP and IRB, 22 November 2020 | 88 | 3 | 9 | 23 | 7 | 17 |
| DAR and CAR, 10 September 2023 | 85 | 6 | 9 | 17 | 19 | 0 |
| DAR and CAR, 28 January 2024 | 95 | 3 | 2 | 16 | 32 | 4 |
| DAR and CAR, 6 September 2026 | 87 | 7 | 6 | 9 | 13 | 3 |
| KSRP, 20 September 2026 | 87 | 4 | 9 | 16 | 15 | 0 |
Read the general science column downward: 9, 7, 19, 32, 13 and 15. Read the economy column: 2, 17, 0, 4, 3 and 0. That is not noise scattered around a mean. That is a paper which changes its mind from cycle to cycle about what it is testing. The two 2026 papers set by KEA are the most mutually consistent pair in the set, landing on 87 general awareness in both, which makes them the better single guide to the next paper.
The middle column is the blueprint we author to, built from the six-paper mean. The right-hand column is the range those six papers actually produced, and wherever the two columns disagree sharply it is the range that should shape your timetable.
| Head | Per 100 | Range in six papers |
|---|---|---|
| Karnataka, all heads together | 16 | 9 to 23 |
| General science | 15 | 7 to 32 |
| Constitution and polity | 13 | 7 to 15 |
| History of India | 8 | 1 to 14 |
| Geography of India | 8 | 4 to 10 |
| Current affairs | 7 | 3 to 9 |
| Freedom movement | 4 | 2 to 6 |
| Economy | 3 | 0 to 17 |
| Sports | 3 | 1 to 5 |
| Science and technology | 3 | 0 to 6 |
| Environment | 2 | 0 to 5 |
| Computer awareness | 2 | 0 to 6 |
| Moral education | 2 | 0 to 4 |
| Art, culture, awards, days and books | 1 | 1 to 7 |
| Police situational judgement | 1 | 0 to 2 |
| Reasoning | 5 | 3 to 7 |
| Arithmetic | 7 | 2 to 9 |
Two of those rows are dated trends rather than noise. Computer awareness ran 6, 3, 2, 1, 0 and 0 in date order, a clean decline to nothing in both KEA papers, so a token revision is enough there. Moral education runs the other way: 0 in every paper up to September 2023, then 1, 3 and 4 in the three papers since, which is the same dated change the civil stream shows.
Because the biggest heads swing so hard from paper to paper, you cannot bet on a weightage. The honest strategy for this exam is to cover the floor of every block rather than optimise for an average that no single paper has ever actually produced. A plan built on the mean is a plan that is correct on average and wrong on the day.
Work the example. You read the mean, decide general science is worth 15 marks, and give it a proportionate share of your hours. Then you sit a paper like 28 January 2024 and science arrives as 32 questions. That is 17 questions more than you planned for, in a subject you had treated as minor, while your extra hours went to heads that shrank. Economy runs the same trap in reverse: 0 questions in two of the six papers, and then 17 in the 22 November 2020 KSRP paper. Revise economy so thin that a repeat is unanswerable and a single paper can end a cycle.
So the rule for the armed paper: prepare to the TOP of the range for the three heads whose range is widest, and to the mean for everything else. In practice that means general science, Karnataka and economy get more hours than their blueprint number suggests, while reasoning and arithmetic get fewer, because their ranges are narrow and their ceiling is low. Reasoning has never exceeded 7 questions in an armed paper and arithmetic has never exceeded 9. There is no armed paper in which a quarter-paper reasoning bank would have paid for itself.
Practise on the paper's own shapes. Match the list grids and multi-statement selection items are a large minority of every armed booklet we read, and a bank of one-fact-one-answer questions will never feel like this exam. Our Karnataka Armed Police Constable test series carries 4,537 questions across 100 tests written for this exam specifically, in English and Kannada, with none of them borrowed from another exam's pool. After every full mock, analyse it properly and separate what you did not know from what you knew and misread.
The Kannada Language Test is a separate qualifying paper of 150 marks needing 50 marks to pass, set at SSLC first language Kannada standard and conducted by KEA. Its marks are not added to merit. In the 2026-27 armed cycle it was held on 22 August 2026, ahead of both written papers, so for the candidates it applies to it gated the right to sit the written exam at all.
It applies to candidates who did not study Kannada as a first or second language up to SSLC, which in practice is a minority of applicants in Karnataka. The scope is grammar, vocabulary, synonyms and antonyms, sentence construction, proverbs and idioms, and comprehension at SSLC level. Note the shape of the thing: a 150 mark paper that contributes nothing to your rank sits in front of a 100 mark paper that decides everything. Spend your hours accordingly, which means clearing it comfortably and then forgetting it.
One paper, 100 questions, 100 marks, 90 minutes, four options, 1 mark for a correct answer and 0.25 off for a wrong one, offline OMR, printed in Kannada and English. 3,914 posts across four notifications, written exams already sat on 6 September and 20 September 2026, results declared, PST and PET eligibility lists published, and the PST and PET dates still unannounced as of 23 October 2026. The paper is 88 per cent general awareness and it changes its mind every cycle about which part of that it wants to test. Prepare to the top of the range for general science, Karnataka and economy, to the mean for everything else, and the swing stops being a risk you carry into the hall.
One focused email a week: notifications, current-affairs recaps and prep strategies built for working aspirants.
As of 23 October 2026 the PST and PET schedule for the armed stream has not been announced. The eligibility lists naming who may attend were published on 10 October 2026 and 18 October 2026, shortlisting candidates at a ratio of 1:10 on written marks. For comparison only, the civil stream's PST and PET ran from 28 September to 15 October 2026 in the same cycle.
There are 3,914 posts across four notifications. CAR and DAR account for 1,421 Residual posts and 179 Kalyana-Karnataka posts under notifications issued on 19 June 2026. KSRP accounts for 1,455 posts and a further 859 posts under notifications issued on 10 July 2026, the 859 splitting into KSRP 334, KSISF 364 and IRB 161.
One objective written paper of 100 questions carrying 100 marks, answered in 90 minutes on an offline OMR sheet. Every question has four options and carries 1 mark, and 0.25 marks are deducted for a wrong answer. The paper is printed in Kannada and English, and the same scheme applies to CAR, DAR, KSRP, KSISF and IRB posts.
No. Six real armed papers print no part heading, no section heading and no sub-total anywhere in the booklet, and the armed notification names the subjects as a flat list with no counts attached. The paper is one undivided set of 100 questions, so the Part A and Part B tables circulating on secondary sites are not supported by any official document or by any real paper.
Candidates who did not study Kannada as a first or second language up to SSLC, which is a minority of applicants in Karnataka. It is a separate qualifying paper of 150 marks needing 50 marks to pass, set at SSLC first language Kannada standard and conducted by KEA. Its marks are not added to merit. In 2026 it was held on 22 August 2026, before both written papers.
