DSSSB ASO Exam Pattern and Syllabus 2026

Based on official Advertisement No. 01/2026 (Combined Examination, 2026) and the corrigendum dated 26.05.2026. Last checked 15.09.2026.

If you are preparing for the Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board (DSSSB) Assistant Section Officer post — earlier called DASS Grade II — the exam pattern below is taken straight from the official notification, not from memory. The single biggest change this cycle is the vacancy count: the corrigendum dated 26.05.2026 raised the Services Department post from 576 to 606, so counting the other two departments the ASO total is now 617.

DSSSB ASO Tier 1 exam pattern

Tier 1 is a screening test. It is purely qualifying — the marks are used only to shortlist candidates for Tier 2 — but you must clear the minimum qualifying percentage to move ahead. It runs for 2 hours and has 200 one-mark questions spread across five subjects.

Each question is worth 1 mark. Questions are bilingual (Hindi and English) except the two language papers, which appear only in their own language.

DSSSB ASO Tier 2 exam pattern

Tier 2 is where the final merit list is made. It is held in a single 3-hour session and combines a 200-mark objective part with a 100-mark descriptive part, for a grand total of 300 marks.

The minimum qualifying criteria in Tier 2 apply to the combined Part 1 and Part 2 marks, not to each part separately. Selection is made strictly on the cumulative Tier 2 score.

Negative marking and qualifying marks

Negative marking applies to every objective question. A wrong 1-mark answer costs 0.25 marks; a wrong 2-mark answer costs 0.50 marks. Since all Tier 1 questions are 1 mark, guessing blindly in Tier 1 costs you 0.25 each time — our practice tests apply the same deduction so your score is realistic.

Vacancies, eligibility, fee and salary

These posts are advertised under Combined Examination 2026. The corrigendum dated 26.05.2026 revised only the Services Department count; the figures below combine all three ASO-carrying departments.

DSSSB ASO Tier 1 syllabus

The Tier 1 syllabus below is the indicative coverage for each of the five subjects. It is the same broad structure the 2019 DASS Grade II papers were set on, which is what makes those papers worth solving.

What the 2019 papers actually asked (our topic count)

We counted every reasoning and numerical question from the 2019 DASS Grade II Shift 1 and Shift 2 papers that is live in our question bank today — 154 questions — and grouped them by topic. This is our own tally, not a figure copied from the notice, and it moves whenever a question is corrected or withdrawn. "Other" is every question our grouping could not place, counted rather than hidden.

The load is spread thinly on the reasoning side — no single topic reaches a sixth of the section — so accuracy across many small topics matters more than mastering one. The numerical half is the opposite: time-work-speed and interest together account for more of it than any other pair of topics, and they are the two worth drilling first.

Counted on 16.09.2026 from 154 live questions. Both papers had 40 reasoning and 40 numerical questions each, so this is a sample of the real paper, not the whole of it.

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