OPSC Assistant Section Officer (ASO) Recruitment Examination

The Assistant Section Officer (ASO) is the entry-level Group-B post of the Odisha Secretariat Service, the staff of the state government's departments at Lok Seva Bhawan, Bhubaneswar. The Odisha Public Service Commission (OPSC) recruits ASOs through an open competitive examination for graduates.

The selection has two stages: a written examination of three objective papers (400 marks) and a computer skill test that you only need to pass. The final merit list is drawn from the written marks alone.

The latest cycle is Advertisement No. 15 of 2026-27 (5 Nov 2026) for 340 posts, 114 of them for women. Applications run from 9 to 30 Nov 2026, and the written exam is tentatively on 17 Jan 2027.

• Qualification: a bachelor's degree in any subject from a recognised university, with adequate knowledge of computer applications.

• Age: 21 to 42 years on 1 Jan 2026 (born between 2 Jan 1984 and 1 Jan 2005). Relaxation: 5 years for SEBC, SC, ST, women and ex-servicemen; 10 years for persons with disabilities; 15 years in total for SEBC, SC or ST candidates with a disability. Only one relaxation applies. The HSC certificate date of birth counts.

• Odia: read, write and speak Odia, and have passed one of these: Middle School with Odia as a language; Matric with Odia as the medium in a non-language subject; Odia as a language in Class 7 or above; or the M.E. standard Odia test of the School & Mass Education Department.

• Government employees can apply but must give a No Objection Certificate at document verification.

• Papers I to III are objective (MCQ), 1 mark each; 0.25 marks are cut for each wrong answer. Questions are in English, except the Odia paper.

• You must pass each paper separately: UR/SEBC 35%, SC/ST 30%, PwD 28%.

• About 1.5 times the vacancies are called for the computer skill test, where you need 40%. The final merit list uses only the 400 written marks; ties go to the higher General Awareness score, then the older candidate.

From Appendix-I of Advertisement No. 15 of 2026-27.

Paper I: General Awareness

Current national and international events; history of British rule in India and the freedom struggle; the Indian Constitution; world physical geography; physical geography of India and Odisha; governance, transparency, e-governance and the role of the civil service; the Indian economy (planning, growth, employment, poverty alleviation, inflation); defence and the armed forces; science in everyday life, environment, ecology, biodiversity and climate change; important national and international institutions.

Paper II: Reasoning and Mathematics

• Verbal reasoning: number series, alphabet series, direction sense, coding-decoding, number ranking, arithmetic reasoning, problems on age.

• Non-verbal reasoning: non-verbal series, mirror images, cubes and dice, grouping identical figures, embedded figures.

• Mathematics (Class 10): arithmetic, algebra, mensuration (2D and 3D), statistics and probability.

Paper III: Language

• English: grammar (verbs, prepositions, adverbs, subject-verb agreement, error correction, tenses, articles), vocabulary, synonyms and antonyms; comprehension; sentence rearrangement.

• Odia: grammar (verbs, error correction, tenses), synonyms, antonyms, adverbs, subject-verb agreement; comprehension; sentence rearrangement.

Paper IV: Computer skill test

Windows, MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), MS Access and use of internet services.

OPSC publishes the marks of the last selected candidate only after the final result and select list. Cut-offs for this cycle are not available yet; we will add them here when OPSC publishes them.

Level 9, Cell 1 of the Odisha pay matrix: ₹35,400 starting basic pay a month under the ORSP Rules, 2017, with dearness and other allowances as sanctioned by the Government of Odisha. Probation is as prescribed in the service rules.