Alerts and Updates for Army Officers Promotion Examination (Part B / Part D)

Part B and Part D at a glance

USI prices the Part B course at Rs 3,000 for the full set, or Rs 800 each for Administration and Military Law and Rs 1,000 each for Military History, Tactics and Current Affairs. Part D is Rs 4,000 for the full set, or Rs 1,000 each for Administration and Military Law and Rs 1,500 each for Military History, Current Affairs and Tactics. A course membership fee of Rs 1,500 applies to those who are not already members. These are course fees charged by USI, not examination fees charged by the Army.

Dates and windows

Every date in this table comes from a preparatory course provider's own calendar rather than from the conducting authority, and the two USI documents we read are not fully consistent with each other on the month in which Part D falls. Take the examination date from the order received in your unit.

What this means for your preparation

This examination has almost no public footprint, and that is not an accident. Part B and Part D are internal Army examinations governed by Army orders, and the only reason any calendar for them appears on the open web at all is that two preparatory institutions, the United Service Institution of India and the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, publish course schedules that shadow the examination. The mistake officers make is planning from those shadow calendars. The order in your unit is the document that binds.

Know which document actually governs you

USI cites Special Army Order 11/S/85 together with Ministry of Defence (Army) letters of 7 March 2019 for Part B and 24 May 2015 for Part D. Two things follow. First, the framework is old and has been amended by later letters, so the operative rules for your seniority and arm are whatever the current amendment says, not whatever a summary on a coaching page says. Second, because these are orders rather than public notifications, the only reliable copy is the one held by your unit adjutant or the formation headquarters. Ask for the current order and the latest amendment by reference, rather than accepting a forwarded extract of uncertain vintage.

The subject set is stable; the weighting is not public

Both USI and CLAWS describe the same five subjects across Part B and Part D: Tactics, Administration, Military Law, Military History and Current Affairs. USI records that the Special to Corps subject is not conducted for Part D. What no public source states is the mark allocation across those subjects, the pass mark, the number of attempts permitted or how a partial pass is carried forward. Those are precisely the parameters that determine a sensible study allocation, and they are only in the order. Do not infer weighting from the relative price of USI's subject modules: Part D's Tactics module costs more than its Military Law module, but that reflects material volume, not examination marks.

Two parts, two different points in a career

The Deccan Herald report described Part B and Part D together as the examinations taken by roughly 10,000 young officers a year, spanning Lieutenants, Captains and Majors. The USI calendar treats them as separate annual events several months apart, with the Part B course beginning in December for a mid-year examination and the Part D course beginning in April for one later in the year. Practically, an officer clearing Part B is likely to be looking at Part D in a subsequent cycle rather than the same one, and the Part D syllabus is treated as the heavier load by the course provider that teaches both. Plan the two as a sequence, not as a single push.

The online format changed where you sit, not what you sit

The only public account of the delivery model is the Deccan Herald report of an Army Commanders Conference decision to move Part B and Part D online, letting officers test at centres near their place of posting rather than travelling to a handful of major cities, with faster results and lower infrastructure cost cited as the drivers. That report is from 2010 and describes the system as then on trial. Nothing we could find states the current format, screen-based question types, or whether any subject retains a written or map-based component. Treat the 2010 account as historical background and confirm the current mode locally before assuming, for example, that Military History still involves marked maps.

Preparatory routes exist and are explicitly authorised

USI runs correspondence courses for both parts under the authority it cites, supplying mock papers set by experienced directing staff, corrected answer sheets with feedback, suggested answers, specially prepared maps for Military History and quarterly Current Affairs supplements. Full-course fees are Rs 3,000 for Part B and Rs 4,000 for Part D, with individual subjects available separately and a Rs 1,500 course membership fee for non-members. CLAWS offers PROMEX, a distance-learning pre-course with provision for online or physical interaction. Both are worth weighing against unit-level study circles, particularly for Military History and Military Law, where curated material is harder to assemble on posting.

Common questions