The Stenographer exam has a reputation as the "easy" SSC exam for twelfth-pass candidates, because the written paper is shorter on maths than CGL or CHSL and the vacancies are few but the applicant pool is smaller than the giants. Both halves of that reputation are half true. The written test really is lighter on maths (there is none), but it is heavy on English, and the shorthand skill test after it is a filter that has ended a lot of otherwise good ranks.
If you already write shorthand, this exam is a strong option. If you do not, then be honest with yourself about the time it takes to build 80 or 100 words per minute from scratch, because that is where your calendar goes, not the written paper.
This guide goes through eligibility, the two stages, what the skill test really involves, and how to allocate a year. Vacancy figures change with every notification, so I am not building the plan around one. The 2025 notification, released in June 2025, covered 261 vacancies across Grade C and D according to news reports, and that gives you a sense of scale: it is a small exam by SSC standards. For the current cycle, read the notification.
Two grades, two different jobs
SSC recruits Stenographers in two grades in the same exam.
Grade C is Group B (non-gazetted) and includes posts in departments and organisations across the central government. It is a personal assistant role to senior officers and is a step up in responsibility and pay.
Grade D is Group C and includes posts in ministries, departments and subordinate offices, with more junior work: taking dictation from officers, preparing drafts, handling correspondence and files.
The pay levels I have seen quoted differ between sources. My understanding is that Grade D sits at Pay Level 4 (starting basic Rs 25,500) and Grade C at Pay Level 7 (starting basic Rs 44,900), which matches the classic 2400 and 4200 grade-pay structure carried into the 7th Pay Commission. Some web sources I read gave different figures, such as a basic of Rs 35,400 for Grade C, and I could not resolve the conflict from an official page. Please read the pay level for each grade in the notification before making a decision that turns on salary.
Allowances follow the usual pattern: dearness allowance at the prevailing rate, house rent allowance by city class, transport allowance, and NPS deduction. For the in-hand estimate method, see the worked approach in /blog/ssc-cgl-in-hand-salary-by-post, which applies the same logic to any pay level.
Eligibility
Education. Class 12 (Senior Secondary) pass from a recognised board. There is no graduate requirement for either grade.
Age. Grade C is 18 to 30 years and Grade D is 18 to 27 years, on the cut-off date in the notification, with the usual relaxations for SC, ST, OBC, PwBD and ex-servicemen. Note the difference: if you are 28 or 29, you can still apply for Grade C but not Grade D. Read the age-relaxation rules for your category in the notification, and see /blog/age-relaxation-ssc-rrb-ibps for the general framework.
Languages. You choose English or Hindi shorthand when you apply, and this is important. It decides your dictation language and your transcription time. You can choose based on your strength, and the written exam covers English language for everyone regardless of that choice.
The two stages
- A computer-based written test (Paper 1 style, a single paper).
- A shorthand skill test, qualifying in nature, followed by document verification.
Merit is decided by the written test. The skill test is qualifying: you must pass it, and your dictation score does not add to your merit rank. That has a double consequence. It means you do not need to be exceptional at shorthand, only reliably above the line. And it means you cannot rescue a low written score with a great skill test.
The written test
As reported for the recent cycles: 200 multiple-choice questions, 200 marks, two hours, with a negative marking of 0.25 per wrong answer.
| Section | Questions | Marks |
|---|---|---|
| General Intelligence and Reasoning | 50 | 50 |
| General Awareness | 50 | 50 |
| English Language and Comprehension | 100 | 100 |
Half of the marks are from English, and that changes how you prepare. A Steno aspirant who studies like a CHSL aspirant, spending most of the time on maths, has misjudged the exam. There is no quantitative section here at all. The only calculation you do is inside reasoning puzzles.
Since the paper is 200 questions in 120 minutes, you have 36 seconds per question on average. English questions, especially error spotting, fill in the blanks and vocabulary, take 15 to 25 seconds if you know your grammar. Comprehension passages take longer. Reasoning questions are quick unless you hit a dense seating or puzzle set. General awareness is fast, and a known answer takes 5 to 10 seconds.
A workable split: 30 minutes for reasoning, 15 minutes for general awareness, 60 minutes for English, and 15 minutes to review. If your reasoning is weak, give it a bit more, and if your English is strong, take the time from there.
What the English section covers
100 questions is a lot of ground, and the question types are predictable. Spot the error, fill in the blanks with the appropriate word, sentence improvement, synonyms and antonyms, one-word substitution, idioms and phrases, active and passive voice, direct and indirect speech, spelling errors, para jumbles, cloze test, and one or two reading comprehension passages. The difficulty is a notch above CGL Tier 1 English in the vocabulary questions, and similar in grammar. For details on techniques see /blog/error-spotting-rules, /blog/one-word-substitution-idioms, /blog/cloze-test-strategy and /blog/english-vocabulary-ssc-ibps.
If English is your weak point, this is the exam where you must fix it. The reasoning and GK sections cannot carry you if you score 40 out of 100 in English.
The skill test: dictation and transcription
This is the stage that most first-time applicants underestimate.
The candidate is given a dictation passage of 10 minutes, read aloud at a fixed speed, in English or Hindi as chosen. For Grade C the speed is 100 words per minute, and for Grade D it is 80 words per minute. You write the passage in shorthand while it is being read, and then transcribe it on a computer within a fixed time.
The transcription times reported for the recent cycle:
| Grade C (100 wpm) | Grade D (80 wpm) | |
|---|---|---|
| English | 40 minutes | 50 minutes |
| Hindi | 55 minutes | 65 minutes |
Do the arithmetic. At 100 wpm for 10 minutes, the passage is about 1,000 words. You must transcribe roughly 1,000 words in 40 minutes if you took English at Grade C, which is 25 words a minute of typing with correction and formatting. That sounds slow, but you are typing from your own shorthand outlines, which you must decode as you go. The accuracy requirement is strict, with a limit on the percentage of errors, so read the notification for the allowed error percentage and what counts as an error (a missed word, a wrong word, punctuation, spelling).
Grade D at 80 wpm has a passage of about 800 words and 50 minutes. Because the pace is slower and the time is longer, Grade D is easier than Grade C, and many candidates who fail at C dictation would pass at D.
There are two things to keep in mind. One, the skill test is a separate exam day, not the same day as the written paper, and admit cards for it are issued only to those who qualify in the written test. Two, the exact speed, duration and transcription times can change from notification to notification, so check them in the one you are applying against.
Building shorthand from zero
If you do not know shorthand, the question is whether you can get there in time. The general experience is that a motivated student learning a standard system (Pitman for English or the Hindi shorthand system taught in institutes) can reach 60 to 80 wpm in six to nine months of daily practice, and 100 wpm takes longer. That is not a guarantee, and I am giving it as a rough pattern rather than a rule, because individual progress varies widely.
Practice structure that works:
- Learning phase, 2 to 3 months. Learn the outlines and grammalogues (the contractions for common words) from a standard textbook, with a teacher if you can. One hour a day, and write, do not just read.
- Speed building, 4 to 6 months. Daily dictation practice at 40, 50, 60, and then higher speeds, using recorded dictations. The standard method is to practise a speed until you can write at it accurately, and then move up in small steps.
- Transcription practice. Type out every dictation and count errors. Many people practise shorthand hard and neglect the typing side. Typing speed and accuracy on a computer matter, since you need to transcribe within the time.
Watch out for a common mistake: pushing speed too soon. Writing at 100 wpm with sloppy outlines that you cannot read back is worse than writing at 80 with clean outlines. Accuracy in transcription is what is tested.
For related preparation, /blog/typing-test-requirements-ssc-steno-cgl covers the typing standards you need for the Steno and CGL posts.
What a good practice hour looks like
Most people practise shorthand badly, so it is worth describing an hour that works.
First ten minutes: warm up by writing the previous day's difficult outlines, the ones you hesitated on, five times each. Next twenty minutes: a dictation at a speed slightly below your comfortable one, say 60 wpm if you are comfortable at 70. This is not for speed, it is for clean outlines under a running clock. Next fifteen minutes: transcribe it on a computer with a timer running, and note your time and errors. Last fifteen minutes: a dictation one step above your comfortable speed. You will make mistakes, which is fine. What you are training is the ability to keep writing when you fall behind, without freezing.
The most valuable habit is a mistake register. After every transcription, list the words you got wrong and why: a badly formed outline, a word you could not read back, a homophone confusion, a punctuation slip. Within a month, you will find that 20 or 30 outlines account for most of your errors, and fixing those is more useful than another hundred passages.
Also practise with a live reader rather than only recordings. Ask a friend to read a passage aloud with natural pauses. Candidates who train only on clean audio are sometimes thrown by an uneven, human pace. The instructions on punctuation and what counts as an error are in the notification and the skill test guidelines, so read those before you set your practice rules.
How to score higher in the written paper
Because the merit list depends only on the written test, the marginal marks matter. A worked example: suppose you attempt 180 of 200 questions, and get 150 right and 30 wrong. Your score is 150 minus 7.5, so 142.5. If you can lift accuracy from 83 percent to 90 percent on the same attempts, you get 162 right and 18 wrong, which is 157.5. That is a 15-mark difference from accuracy alone, without answering a single extra question. In an exam where the gap between ranks near the cut-off may be only a few marks, accuracy work is the cheapest way to move.
Where does the accuracy come from? For English, it comes from learning the rules behind error-spotting questions instead of going by feel. If you can name the rule (subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, preposition after a verb), you get the question right more often than if you rely on what "sounds right". For reasoning, it comes from practising each type until the method is automatic. For general awareness, from a small number of good sources read repeatedly, not a large number read once.
For the 50 general awareness questions, static subjects (history, geography, polity, science, economy) usually carry more than current affairs, but current affairs is the one that changes fastest, so give it a fixed daily slot. See /blog/static-gk-ssc-rrb and /blog/monthly-current-affairs-capsule-how-to.
Balancing shorthand and the written test
You have two parallel skills to build, and they compete for the same hours. A plan for someone starting from scratch, with 12 months available and about 5 hours a day:
Months 1 to 3. Two hours of shorthand learning and dictation, three hours on written syllabus basics. English grammar, reasoning basics, and static GK.
Months 4 to 6. Two hours of shorthand speed building, three hours on written syllabus depth. Start sectional tests for reasoning and English.
Months 7 to 9. Two hours of shorthand dictation at higher speed with transcription, three hours of written practice. Begin full-length mocks once every 10 days.
Months 10 to 12. One and a half hours of shorthand, mostly revision and dictation of new passages you have never seen, and three and a half hours of full mocks and analysis. In the last two months, mock tests every alternate day.
If you already know shorthand and just need the written exam, compress it to five or six months and keep a daily half hour of dictation to stay sharp.
Because the written test decides merit, the mock-test side deserves real attention. Pareeksha's full-length mocks at /mock-tests include English-heavy sectional practice, and the percentile you see after each test gives a sense of where you stand among other candidates, which a raw score cannot tell you.
Cut-offs and how to think about them
I have not verified a specific cut-off figure for Grade C or D, and I would not trust one from a random site, because it varies by category, year and grade. What you can do is find the previous year's cut-off table published by SSC after the result and look at the range for your category. Set a personal target that is comfortably above the range.
Since the vacancy count is small and the skill test filters some candidates, the final selection depends on both merit rank and skill test qualification. A rank that looks high in the written test can be wasted if you cannot clear dictation. This is why some candidates who are decent at the written paper choose Grade D as the safer route, applying to both grades and being considered for whichever they qualify for.
Common mistakes
Starting shorthand only after the written test result. You will have a few weeks between the result and the skill test. Nobody builds 80 wpm in a few weeks.
Not checking the language choice. Choosing Hindi shorthand because Hindi is your mother tongue is sensible, but the transcription time is longer and the typing needs a Hindi keyboard layout. Practise on the layout that the exam uses. The notification names it, typically a specific Hindi typing layout, so confirm.
Neglecting the English section. It is half the paper.
Ignoring the error limit. Speed without accuracy fails. Practise with a marking sheet.
Choosing a poor recording. Practise with dictations at the correct speed and with different accents and voices. Exam dictation is read by an official, not a polished audio.
Skipping the medical and DV checks. Document verification for Steno covers class 12 certificates, category certificates and other details. See /blog/document-verification-checklist.
Is it worth it
Steno suits someone who already has shorthand, or who enjoys the practice and is patient. The reward is a stable central government job with an interesting profile: you work close to senior officers, and the career path can lead through the stenographer cadre to private secretary and personal secretary posts. It is not the highest-paying SSC post, and it is not fast for promotions.
If you are twelfth pass, ready to work at a skill for about a year and want something less crowded than CGL and CHSL, it is a reasonable choice. If you lack the patience for daily dictation practice, or you would rather prepare with mocks only, choose another exam. See /blog/which-exam-suits-graduates-and-12th-pass for an overview of where twelfth-pass candidates can aim.
This week
If you know no shorthand, look up the recommended textbook and a shorthand class in your area, and set aside one hour a day for it starting now. If you do know it, record yourself a 10-minute dictation at your target speed and see how many words you can transcribe accurately. Then take an English section test with 100 questions, timed at 60 minutes. Between the two, you will know where the weeks should go.
FAQ
Is graduation required for Steno? No. Class 12 pass is the requirement for both Grade C and Grade D.
Do skill test marks count in the merit? No. The skill test is qualifying. The merit list is prepared from the written test marks.
Can I apply for both Grade C and Grade D? Yes, if you meet the age and qualification for both. Many candidates do so, since the cut-off and skill speed for Grade D are more forgiving.
What speed is needed? In the 2025 cycle, dictation was 100 wpm for Grade C and 80 wpm for Grade D, for 10 minutes, with fixed transcription times. Confirm in the notification, since the speed can change.
Is there negative marking in the written test? Yes, 0.25 marks for each wrong answer, as reported for the recent pattern.
Is there an age difference between grades? Yes. Grade C is up to 30 years and Grade D is up to 27 years, before category relaxations.
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