The non-technical part of the syllabus is common to all candidates and modest in scope. The technical part is where the exam actually lives, and it maps closely onto a standard three-year diploma curriculum — which is why candidates who still have their diploma notes are at a real advantage over those studying from general competitive-exam material.
- General Intelligence and Reasoning
- Analogies, similarities and differences, space visualisation, problem solving, analysis, judgement, decision making, visual memory, discrimination, observation, relationship concepts, arithmetical reasoning, verbal and figure classification, and arithmetical number series. Common to all three disciplines.
- General Awareness
- Current events, and everyday observation and experience in their scientific aspect, along with history, culture, geography, economic scene, general polity and the Constitution, and scientific research. Common to all three disciplines and pitched at a general level.
- General Engineering — Civil and Structural
- Building materials, estimating, costing and valuation, surveying, soil mechanics, hydraulics, irrigation engineering, transportation engineering, environmental engineering, theory of structures, concrete technology, RCC design and steel design. The structural topics carry the most weight in most cycles.
- General Engineering — Mechanical
- Theory of machines and machine design, engineering mechanics and strength of materials, thermal engineering covering the properties of pure substances, the laws of thermodynamics, air standard cycles, IC engines, boilers, steam and gas turbines and refrigeration and air conditioning, fluid mechanics and machinery, and production engineering covering classification of steels and basic manufacturing processes.
- General Engineering — Electrical
- Basic concepts and circuit law, AC fundamentals, magnetic circuits, measurement and measuring instruments, electrical machines including DC machines, transformers and induction machines, synchronous machines, generation, transmission and distribution, estimation and costing, utilisation of electrical energy, and basic electronics.
A word on where to spend time within the technical syllabus. Every discipline has a small number of topics that appear in almost every cycle — structural analysis and RCC in civil, thermodynamics and strength of materials in mechanical, machines and circuit theory in electrical. Previous papers identify these far more reliably than a syllabus list, which gives every topic equal visual weight regardless of how often it is examined.
Read the syllabus with your diploma transcript beside you. Almost every listed technical topic corresponds to a subject you have already sat an examination in, and the useful exercise is not learning the list but marking each item as solid, rusty or never properly understood. That three-way split, done honestly in an afternoon, is a better study plan than any generic schedule, because it is the only one calibrated to what you personally have to rebuild.
