SSC MTS Exam Pattern: Session-I Is a Gate, Session-II Decides the Rank

The SSC MTS exam is one computer-based test on one day, in two back-to-back sessions of 45 minutes. The two sessions do very different jobs. Session-I — maths and reasoning — is a gate: it has no negative marking and only has to be cleared. Session-II — general awareness and English — carries a penalty for wrong answers and is the only score used for the merit list. Many pages still describe a flat “0.25 negative marking”, which is wrong on both counts. This guide sets out the pattern from SSC’s notice, what the minimum marks mean, the syllabus and languages, and how SSC now normalises scores.

SSC MTS 2025 notice.

SSC evaluates Session-I first, and evaluates Session-II only for candidates who clear Session-I. The merit list for MTS is “prepared solely based on performance in Session-II”, on normalised marks; Session-I marks come back only as the second tie-breaker. So a candidate with a brilliant Session-I and a weak Session-II gains nothing from the maths, while a candidate who just clears Session-I and does very well in Session-II can top the list.

Session-II is the tighter one: 50 questions in 45 minutes, and it is the session that decides merit. Many of its questions are recall — a general awareness fact is known or not — so the time saved there can go to the English passage and grammar questions. Session-I has more time per question and no penalty, which makes it the place to work steadily rather than fast.

Every question carries 3 marks, so a wrong answer in Session-II costs one-third of the question’s value. In Session-I there is nothing to lose, so every question should be answered, even with a guess. In Session-II, a guess is worth making when you can narrow the options. The notice does not state how many options a question has, so check the screen on the day: if a question has four options, a blind guess returns ¼ × 3 − ¾ × 1 = 0 marks on average, and ruling out even one option makes it positive (our arithmetic). The practical rule is to answer every Session-I question and to answer Session-II questions you can narrow down.

General awareness is pitched at Class 10 — the syllabus says so explicitly — which makes NCERT social science and science books up to Class 10 the natural source. English is basic usage plus one short passage. Both Session-II parts carry the same 75 marks, so neither can be neglected.

After the test SSC publishes tentative answer keys with candidates’ responses. In the 2025 exam a challenge cost ₹50 per question (the notice had said ₹100; the 2024 keys charged ₹100). There is no re-evaluation or re-checking of scores. When candidates tie on Session-II marks, SSC breaks the tie in a fixed order.

The exam is offered in Hindi, English and 13 regional languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri (Meitei), Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. The regional-language option covers Session-I and the General Awareness part of Session-II only; English Language and Comprehension is not offered in the regional languages.

MTS runs over many shifts, so SSC normalises Session-II scores before ranking. From the 2025 exam onward SSC uses an equipercentile method (notice of 2 June 2025): each candidate’s percentile within their own shift is computed; for every shift, the raw score at that percentile is found (by interpolation where needed); and the normalised score is the average of those raw scores. In SSC’s words, a candidate “who scored better than 80% of examinees in one shift will be matched to the candidate who scored better than 80% of examinees in another shift”. The 2024 exam used the older 2019 formula based on shift averages and spreads.

Two consequences matter. Cut-offs carry long decimals (for example 142.35543), and a raw Session-II score can normalise up or down depending on the difficulty of the shift. And because the method changed, the 2024 cut-offs are on a different scale from the 2025 ones — comparisons across the two should be treated with care.