Alerts and Updates for DRDO CEPTAM (Technical and Administrative Cadre)

Tier-1 is a screening stage only: it decides who is called for Tier-2 and does not contribute to the final merit, which is built on the Tier-2 subject paper. Technician-A candidates sit a shorter subject paper of about 90 minutes and then a trade test that is qualifying in nature. Part of the fee is refundable, and only to candidates who actually appeared for Tier-1.

The application dates and the Tier-1 date come from DRDO's own corrigendum and examination notice. The Tier-1 result date, the Tier-2 admit card date and the current status of the Tier-2 answer key are from recruitment trackers rather than a DRDO notice, and are marked accordingly.

The most common mistake with CEPTAM is treating Tier-1 as the exam. It is not. Tier-1 is a 150-mark general screening with no negative marking whose only job is to decide who is allowed to sit the paper that actually counts, and the final merit is built on the Tier-2 subject paper of 120 marks. Candidates who spend eight months on aptitude and four weeks on their discipline consistently clear Tier-1 and then fall out of merit.

Tier-1 has four blocks, General Science at 40 marks, Quantitative Aptitude at 40, General Intelligence and Reasoning at 40 and General English at 30, making 150 marks in 120 minutes. The qualifying bar is 40 per cent for unreserved and OBC candidates and 35 per cent for SC and ST candidates, which is a low bar on paper but competitive in practice because the shortlist is drawn discipline by discipline. Since there is no negative marking at this stage, leaving a question blank has no defensive value at all; every unanswered question is simply a mark surrendered. The practical rule is to finish the paper, mark everything, and reserve the last few minutes for the General Science and Reasoning items, which are the two blocks where a careful second pass most often converts guesses into marks.

The Tier-2 sitting is split into a short personality or psychometric component of about 20 minutes followed by the subject paper of 120 marks. For STA-B the subject paper runs about 120 minutes and is set against the discipline the candidate applied in, of which the advertisement lists seventeen; for Technician-A the paper is shorter, about 90 minutes, and is followed by a trade test that is qualifying rather than scored into merit. Because merit is discipline-wise and trade-wise, a candidate is competing only against others who chose the same code, so the sensible preparation is depth in one syllabus rather than breadth across the technical cadre. Candidates who applied in a discipline different from their degree specialisation are the group most often caught out here.

The 764 posts are not spread evenly. STA-B's 561 posts are divided across seventeen disciplines and Technician-A's 203 across sixteen trades, so some codes carry a handful of vacancies while others carry dozens. The category split published for the cadre, with 249 unreserved among the STA-B posts and 103 among Technician-A, gives a sense of scale but not of per-discipline depth, which DRDO releases in the discipline table of the advertisement. Before any future CEPTAM drive, the first hour of work is reading that table and identifying which eligible code has the largest intake, because a thin code with two posts can demand a cut-off twenty marks higher than a code with thirty.

If you sat the 15 June Tier-2, nothing further is required of you until DRDO publishes the answer key and the provisional selection list. Trackers describe the Tier-2 answer key as released while the result remains unpublished, so treat any merit list circulating outside drdo.gov.in as unverified. The stage after the result is document verification, followed by medical examination and joining formalities, which means originals of the degree or diploma, category and date-of-birth certificates should be assembled now rather than after a call letter with a short deadline arrives. Keep the registered email and mobile from the application live, because DRDO uses them for the same alerts it used for Tier-1.

The application fee for CEPTAM-11 was 750 rupees for STA-B and 600 rupees for Technician-A for unreserved, OBC and EWS candidates, and 500 rupees for SC, ST, women and PwBD candidates, with a refundable component returned only to those who actually appeared in Tier-1. That refund rule is a deliberate deterrent against applications made without intent to sit, and it is worth noting for the next drive. Note also the cadre boundary: CEPTAM-11's vacancy tables carry only STA-B and Technician-A, both technical cadre posts under DRTC. Candidates hoping for administrative and allied vacancies through this numbered drive will not find them in it and should watch DRDO's vacancy page for a separate advertisement.