SAS Common Papers PC-1, PC-2, PC-3: Marks Split and a Study Plan

Whatever your branch, three of your eight SAS papers are the same as everyone else's: PC-1 Language Skills, PC-2 Government Audit and PC-3 Information Technology (Theory and Practical). Each carries 100 marks. They are also the papers where the revised syllabus moved furthest from the old one: PC-2 gives a fifth of its marks to statistics, and PC-3 puts 40 marks on hands-on work in Excel and an audit data tool. This guide sets out the marks in each part, what the syllabus asks for, and a way to share your study hours. ProSyllabus is an independent study site, not part of the CAG or the IA&AD. Every rule here is quoted or summarised from Exam Wing circulars and the CAG website; your Head of Department and the Exam Wing decide every individual case.

PC-1 is the only three-hour paper and the only fully descriptive common one. Its objective is to test whether you can read material and "analyse information before drafting an audit product", which explains why the largest item is a draft paragraph or draft audit comments framed from given material that may come from compliance audit, performance audit, or the financial statements of autonomous bodies, PSUs or governments. The reading list names the MSO (Audit) chapter on preparing the audit report and the department's Style Guide. The essay is 500 words on one of four or five topics; the precis is to one third of the passage; the letter may be an official or demi-official letter or an office memorandum. The ranges in the table add to between 85 and 110, so the exact split will vary by paper; our tool uses the midpoints.

Two notes in the PC-2 syllabus change how you should study it. First, it tests the ability to differentiate between different audits and their applicability, while "the details of different types of audit will be covered in respective Group II papers". Rules or provisions that form audit criteria "should not be asked to test knowledge" in PC-2, but questions may be asked about their applicability, and "the rule provision may be provided to candidates as part of case" (may, not will). That does not take the mandate material out of PC-2: its own section I lists the constitutional provisions, the DPC Act and the 2020 Regulations. Second, the statistics section is 20 per cent: descriptive statistics, graphical and numerical representation, mean, median and mode, dispersion, basic correlation and sampling techniques, with questions meant to test applying them "in a typical audit situation". The reading list names the NCERT Class XI textbook Statistics for Economics for this part. The mandate section lists the constitutional provisions (Article 12, Articles 112 to 117 and 148 to 151, 202 to 207, Parts IX and IXA, XI and XII), the CAG's (DPC) Act 1971 and the Regulations on Audit and Accounts 2020; the standards section lists ISSAI 1, 10, 100, 130, 200, 300 and 400 and the CAG's Auditing Standards.

PC-3's theory list reads like the IA&AD's own IT policy shelf: the CAG's Standing Order on IT Auditing (August 2020), the IT Audit Manual 2024, the CAG's Data Governance Policy and E-Waste rules, the IT Act 2000, MeitY cybersecurity guidelines, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, the Aadhaar Act, and the CAG's AI strategic framework. The database section (15 marks) asks for normalisation, keys and integrity constraints, and SQL with joins, views and action queries, which is also useful for the 25-mark CAAT exercises, since SQL queries are one of the three examples the syllabus gives (Tableau and KNIME are the others). The syllabus does not say the candidate chooses the tool, so do not prepare for one alone; the PC-3 demo video on the Dashboard is the best guide to the screen you will actually get. For Excel the syllabus names, among other things (it ends the list with "etc."), VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH, append functions, pivot tables, Power Pivot, what-if analysis, data validation and conditional formatting. The Exam Wing published demo videos for PC-1, PC-3 and PC-8 on the Dashboard before the 2026 sitting; watch the PC-3 one before your first practice session so the screen is not new on the day.

Start with the parts that need skill rather than recall, because they take longest to build. For PC-3, that is the practical: set up Excel and get hands-on time with the CAAT tools the syllabus names as examples (Tableau, KNIME and SQL queries), leaning on whichever your office already uses, and work through real exercises weekly from the start. For PC-2, it is statistics, which rewards short, frequent practice more than one long read. For PC-1, write one draft paragraph a week from an actual audit report's material and compare it with the published paragraph. Leave the reading-heavy parts (the constitutional provisions, the ISSAIs, the IT policies) for the middle weeks, and keep the last fortnight for timed papers: two hours for PC-2 and PC-3, three for PC-1. For question style, use the official model questions, the sample case-study MCQs and the demo videos on the Dashboard, alongside the format notes in the syllabus itself and Circular 06 of 2026 (case studies, application and assertion/reasoning questions). One warning: the general model-question set was drafted for the pre-March-2025 syllabus (its file cover still reads "w.e.f. Exam-2 of 2024"), and its PC-3 practical still sets MS Word and MS Access tasks. PC-3 was revised on 11.03.2025 to 15 marks of Excel and 25 of CAAT exercises, and the later model-question sets on the Dashboard cover PC-8, 9, 10 and 17 to 20, not PC-3, so do not treat that PC-3 practical as the current pattern.

ProSyllabus has no SAS practice quizzes yet, so this guide does not point you to any.