PA/SA LDCE Paper-I: Where the 100 Marks Come From, Topic by Topic

The PA/SA Limited Departmental Competitive Examination — the “LGO exam” by which MTS, Postmen, Mail Guards and, in their own route, Gramin Dak Sevaks become Postal and Sorting Assistants — is decided by one paper. Paper-I carries 100 marks, runs for 120 minutes and is the only paper whose marks count towards merit. The Data Entry Skill Test that follows is qualifying. The local-language paper that older guides still describe was removed by a Directorate letter of 29.05.2024, so the 2026 exam was Paper-I plus DEST and nothing else.

What makes Paper-I worth studying closely is that the Department publishes exactly how many questions each block carries. There are 100 questions of one mark each: 50 in Part A on postal knowledge and 50 in Part B on general ability. That blueprint tells you something most candidates never act on: reasoning and basic arithmetic together are 40 of the 100 marks — more than the Post Office Guide, and those 40 marks are won by practice — applying a handful of basic rules quickly — rather than by memorising manuals.

Annexure C of the 10.05.2019 letter as amended, reproduced in the Karnataka 2026 notification.

Read the chart from the top. Two blocks of 20 marks each sit in Part B, and both are skills: you either can do a time-and-work sum or a figure series in under a minute, or you cannot. Candidates who have worked in a post office for years usually do well on the Guide and on products, because they handle them every day. They lose the paper in Part B, where the marks go to whoever practised. Five blocks of 10 marks each follow, and then the two 5-mark manual blocks — the Savings Bank manual and the mails and foreign post manuals — which carry the most reading per mark in the whole syllabus.

Two exclusions are printed in the blueprint and are easy to miss: the Telegraphic Money Order is out of Part I, and the British and Irish Postal Order is out of Part II. The Savings Bank block has a moving edge — orders issued by the Directorate up to 31 December of the year before the exam. For the 2026 exam that meant orders up to 31 December 2025, and for 2027 it will mean orders up to 31 December 2026. Anything issued in the exam year itself is outside the syllabus.

The products block names its reference: the India Post website. That matters because interest rates, product limits and the scheme list do change, and an old guide will not show it. Read the current product pages in the months before the exam rather than relying on last year’s notes.

The 2026 Paper-I was held on Sunday 28 June 2026. Circles had first notified 21 June; a Directorate letter of 29.05.2026 moved it by a week, and the Uttar Pradesh circle’s notice of 04.06.2026 records the change with nothing else altered. The paper was common to the LDCE and the GDS competitive exam, printed in four sets (A to D). Andhra Pradesh published its final answer key on 20.07.2026 after a provisional key on 29.06.2026; in the final key some questions are marked deleted and some accept two options.

Deletions cost nothing if you prepared evenly, but they show why guessing the likely questions is a poor strategy: in 2026 between two and five questions were struck out, depending on the circle. The blueprint is the reliable part. Every year it is ten questions from each Guide part, ten from IT, ten from products, five and five from the manuals, ten general awareness, twenty arithmetic and twenty reasoning.

Here is our reading of the numbers, not an official instruction. Divide your hours roughly the way the marks are divided, then shift time towards whichever block you are weakest in. For most departmental candidates that means starting with arithmetic and reasoning, because they are 40 marks, they reward daily practice rather than one reading, and they are the part of the paper where a working postal official has no head start. Keep the two Guide parts, IT and products for steady revision, because you use much of that knowledge at the counter already. Leave the two 5-mark manual blocks until the structure of the rest is secure: they carry 10 marks between them, and the reading is long.

Non-verbal reasoning deserves a specific word. The blueprint says “non verbal / pictorial”, which means figure series, mirror and water images, paper folding, embedded figures, counting figures and pattern completion — not the verbal syllogisms and coding that fill general reasoning books. Give those pictorial types most of your reasoning practice; the blueprint names the category, not a closed list of question types, so the list above is our reading of what “pictorial” usually covers. Twenty questions in a 120-minute paper also means time is not the main constraint; accuracy is.