HPRCA Assistant Staff Nurse Syllabus and Exam Pattern

Compiled from the official syllabus · check it against the official link

The whole exam is one objective paper of 120 questions ↑

Advertisement No. 12/2026, dated 23.07.2026, invites online applications from female candidates only for 312 posts of Assistant Staff Nurse (Post Code 26044) under the Director, Medical Education & Research, Himachal Pradesh. The engagement is on a fixed monthly honorarium of Rs. 25,000 for a period of five years, and the whole recruitment is governed by the state government policy notified on 06.11.2025, which the advertisement carries as Annexure-"A".

Read the pattern first, because it decides how you spend the next few weeks. One paper, one hundred and twenty questions, ninety minutes on the clock. That is roughly forty-five seconds per question — our own arithmetic on the stated duration, not a figure HPRCA prints — and it means speed is part of what is being tested. The commission also says the mode may be CBT or OMR, and that where the number of candidates for a post is limited it may prefer OMR over CBT.

Every syllabus entry HPRCA published, and nothing added ↑

Page 5 of the advertisement carries a heading literally printed as "Syllabus :". Under it sit eight entries in two parts. Those eight lines are the entire published syllabus for this post — there is no annexure with topic lists, no unit-wise breakdown and no marks split between the two parts. The table below carries all eight, worded the way the commission words them, with the standard each one is pegged to.

The count of eight is ours: we are counting the distinct subject names the commission prints. What matters is that nothing has been dropped and nothing has been added. If you see a page elsewhere offering you thirty or forty topics for this exam with confident unit headings, those topics are somebody's guess about a syllabus HPRCA has not issued.

The qualifying bar is a percentage, and it can move down ↑

The advertisement fixes a minimum qualifying score for the screening test: at least 45% for General category candidates and 40% for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Other Backward Classes and Wards of Freedom Fighters candidates. It then adds an escape valve. If fewer candidates clear that bar than there are advertised posts, the Aayog may relax the qualifying percentage by a maximum of 5% — down to 40% for General and 35% for the reserved categories — for reasons to be recorded in writing.

HPRCA states percentages, not marks. The mark column below is our own arithmetic on the 120-mark total, printed only to make the bar concrete; it is not a figure the commission publishes, and it is not a cut-off. The cut-off is a different animal altogether: it depends on how many people apply and how they perform, and it is published only after the result.

Who is allowed to sit this paper at all ↑

The eligibility conditions matter to a syllabus page because Part (i) of the syllabus is defined by them: the paper is pegged to the level of the essential qualification, so the qualification is the syllabus. Everything in this table is from pages 1, 4 and 5 of the advertisement.

Two conditions catch people out. The post is open to female candidates only — the advertisement says so in its opening line and repeats it in the qualifications table. And registration with the Himachal Pradesh Nurses Registration Council, Shimla, is an essential qualification, not a formality to be arranged after selection.

Fees, the correction window and the answer-key challenge ↑

There is no fee concession for any category in this recruitment. The advertisement's fee table has a single row for candidates: all categories pay the same. The correction window and the answer-key objection both carry their own separate charges, and both have short deadlines that are easy to miss.

The answer-key window is the one worth planning for. HPRCA uploads a provisional answer key after the answer sheets are frozen, gives seven days for objections, charges a non-refundable fee per challenge, and finalises the result on the revised key. Note also that no rechecking or re-evaluation is entertained afterwards — the objection window is the only chance to contest a question.

At a glance

Part (i): your own nursing course is the syllabus ↑

Part (i) is one line long and it is the most important line on the page: "Subjects(s)/field(s) upto the level of prescribed essential qualification(s) as notified in the advertisement." The prescribed essential qualification for this post is B.Sc. Nursing with 50% marks or GNM (A Grade Nursing Diploma) with 50% marks. So the professional half of this paper is pegged to the syllabus you have already studied.

That has a practical consequence worth stating plainly. The authoritative topic list for Part (i) is the curriculum of your own recognized University or Institution — the one your degree or diploma was awarded against. HPRCA has not published a nursing topic list for this post, and we are not going to write one and present it as the commission's. A confident-looking list of nursing subjects on a job site is an editor's guess wearing an official coat.

What the advertisement does fix is the ceiling: "upto the level of" the essential qualification. Nothing above the level of a B.Sc. Nursing or GNM course is in scope. Revise from your own course material and your own syllabus copy, and keep watching the commission's website — the advertisement itself says HPRCA may issue a detailed syllabus in due course of time.

Part (ii): the general half, and what "Matric Standard" fixes ↑

Part (ii) has two halves. Part (ii)(a) is General Knowledge including General Knowledge of Himachal Pradesh, and Current Affairs — no standard is attached to either. Part (ii)(b) is Everyday Science, Logical Reasoning, Social Science, General English and General Hindi, and all five carry the phrase "of Matric Standard".

That phrase is doing real work. Matric Standard is a ceiling, and it tells you the level to stop at: a class-10 standard question, not a graduate one. It is the difference between revising school science and reopening a degree textbook. HPRCA has published no topic list for any of these five subjects, so the right-hand column below is our plain reading of the commission's own wording — it is guidance, not an official expansion, and it is labelled that way on purpose.

One asymmetry is worth noticing. Part (ii)(a) has no standard attached, which means General Knowledge and Current Affairs are not capped at Matric level in the way the five subjects below them are. Himachal Pradesh general knowledge appears by name in the syllabus, so state-level material is explicitly in scope for a state commission's paper.

If the exam runs in shifts, your raw score is not your score ↑

With 312 posts on offer the paper is very likely to run in more than one shift, and the advertisement is explicit about what happens then: the score of candidates shall be normalised using the Z-Score Method (Mean and Standard Deviation Method) for preparation of the merit list. The commission prints the formula, so we can reproduce its terms exactly.

The plain-language version: your raw mark is rescaled so that a harder shift is not punished and an easier one is not rewarded. The shift with the highest average score is taken as the base, and every other shift is scaled to it. Nothing you can do in the hall changes this — it is worth knowing only so that a raw score lower than a friend's in another shift does not send you into a panic before the merit list is out.

The same document gives two different age limits ↑

This one needs saying out loud, because getting it wrong costs a candidate the application fee and the attempt. The advertisement's own General Instructions on page 1 state that the minimum and maximum age limit is 21 and 45 years, reckoned as on 01-01-2026. Annexure-"A" — the government policy that page 4 says governs this very recruitment — states on its own page that the age is 21 years to 32 years.

We are not going to resolve that for you by picking the number that suits the story, and we are not going to hide it. Both figures are printed in the same PDF and we have quoted both with their pages. If you are between 32 and 45, treat your eligibility as unsettled until HPRCA says otherwise, and ask the commission before you pay: the facilitation counter is on phone 01972-222204 and email [email protected], on any working day between 10:00 A.M. and 05:00 P.M.

The relaxation clause is stated only against the page 1 figure. The upper age limit is relaxable by up to five years for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Other Backward Classes and Persons with Disabilities candidates who are domiciles of Himachal Pradesh, for employees of the Himachal Pradesh Government and for Ex-servicemen of Himachal Pradesh.

What this advertisement does not tell you, and where to look ↑

The single source for everything on this page is HPRCA Advertisement No. 12/2026 dated 23.07.2026, a 16-page scanned PDF published by the commission at hprca.hp.gov.in. It has no text layer, so it was read by optical character recognition and then corrected by hand against the page images; every number above was checked against the scan rather than against the machine's first guess. The PDF is served from the commission's own advertisements list, so open it from that page rather than from a direct file link.

A syllabus that is eight lines long leaves real questions unanswered. Naming those gaps is more useful than filling them with a confident guess, so here is what the advertisement does not say. On 2 September 2026 we also checked the commission's own syllabus page at hprca.hp.gov.in/syllabus: it returned "No records are available at the moment." No detailed HPRCA syllabus exists for this post yet.

• Whether there is negative marking. The word does not appear anywhere in the 16 pages. The advertisement says each question carries 1 mark and stops there — so treat the deduction rule as unknown, not as zero.
• How the 120 questions are split between Part (i) and Part (ii). Only the total is given. Any table showing you a Part (i) versus Part (ii) marks split for this post is an estimate.
• How many questions come from each named subject. There is no topic-wise or subject-wise count in the document.
• A topic list for Part (i). The paper is pegged to your B.Sc. Nursing or GNM course, and the commission leaves the topic list to that course.
• A topic list for the five Matric-standard subjects. The commission names the subjects and the standard, and nothing further.
• The exam date. The advertisement mentions the date of the screening test only as a cut-off for including fresh vacancies (up to 31.10.2026 or the exam date, whichever is earlier). No date is fixed.
• The cut-off marks. The qualifying percentages are stated; the cut-off that actually decides selection is published only after the result.
• The language the paper will be set in. The syllabus names both General English and General Hindi as subjects, but the document does not say which language the question paper itself will use.
• Any book or reading list. HPRCA prescribes a syllabus; it does not prescribe textbooks, and a topic list is not a reading list.
• The detailed syllabus itself. The advertisement says on page 5 that HPRCA may issue a detailed syllabus on its official website in due course of time. Until it does, the eight entries above are the whole of it.

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