UPSSSC PET Previous Year Question Paper PDF

Which UPSSSC PET papers are available here

Every UPSSSC recruitment in Uttar Pradesh now runs through one screening test, so these papers are
the single most useful thing an aspirant can sit down with. They are the real examination booklets
from the 2021, 2022 and 2023 sittings, not a coaching institute’s reconstruction, and the 2023 files
carry the official answer marked against each question.

Six question papers and four answer keys are hosted here, covering every PET sitting from 2021
through 2023. The download for each row sits in the Important Links table at the end of this page, so
pick the year and shift you want there. UPSSSC itself releases papers only through a candidate login
that needs an application number and date of birth, and that login returns only the paper of the shift
you personally sat. Open copies of the other shifts are therefore hard to find, which is the reason
all six are kept together on one page here.

UPSSSC PET exam pattern — 15 sections, 100 marks

The pattern has not changed across any of the papers below, which is exactly why solving them is
worth the time. One mark per question, one-quarter mark deducted for every wrong answer, two hours
for the whole thing. It is an offline OMR test, so practising on paper rather than on a screen is
closer to the real thing.

What actually repeated across the PET papers

This is the part a syllabus page cannot give you. Reading the 2023 booklets end to end, a few
patterns show up hard enough to plan around. The national movement questions lean towards the
smaller organisations and one-off events rather than the famous set pieces — the Gadar Party
headquarters, the founder of the Khudai Khidmatgars, Direct Action Day, the Motilal Nehru Committee.
Anyone who studied only the Gandhi-era headlines loses these five marks.

The economy block is almost always institutional rather than theoretical. Across the papers you get
NABARD’s creation, which banks were left out of the first phase of nationalisation, who approves the
Fair and Remunerative Price for sugarcane, where IRDAI is headquartered, what counts as a depository
institution. These are facts you either know or you do not — no reasoning will recover them.

There is also a quiet Uttar Pradesh slant worth noticing. The 2023 paper asked which organisation
ran the first Kisan March in Pratapgarh district in 1920. State-specific history and geography turn up
often enough that a candidate preparing purely from national-level material is at a disadvantage.

The science questions are consistently pitched at school level but phrased to catch someone who
memorised definitions without understanding them — the function of the larynx, which acid gives nettle
leaves their sting, why stars appear to twinkle, which dwarf planet sits inside the asteroid belt.
None of these need a physics background. They need the NCERT chapter read once with attention.

Arithmetic follows the same logic. The word problems are salary-and-expenses or percentage sums of
the kind that appear in every state-level paper, and the calculation itself is rarely hard. What costs
candidates marks is time: five arithmetic questions sitting in the middle of a paper that also demands
two unread passages, two graphs and two data tables in the same two hours. Solving a full paper under
a real clock is the only way to find out whether your reading speed, not your knowledge, is the
problem.

How to use these PET papers properly

Downloading ten PDFs and reading them like a book is the most common way to waste them. The papers
are a diagnostic tool, and they only work if you treat each one as a real exam first.

1. Print or open one full paper and set a timer for exactly 2 hours. Do not pause it.
2. Attempt in the order the paper gives you, not the order you find easy — that is what exam day will feel like.
3. Apply the negative marking yourself: subtract 0.25 for every wrong answer. A raw score of 70 with 20 wrong is really 65.
4. Only then open the answer key or the marked 2023 solved paper and score it.
5. Write down every wrong answer by section. After three papers the weak sections are obvious and stop being a matter of opinion.
6. Go back to the source material for those sections only. Re-solving papers you have already seen teaches you very little.
7. Save the most recent year’s paper for last, as a final check two weeks before the exam.

The two-hour limit is the part most candidates quietly ignore, and it is the part that decides the
score. A paper attempted across an evening with breaks tells you what you know. The same paper
attempted against a clock tells you what you can retrieve under pressure, which is a different and
much smaller number. Treat the first attempt at each paper as unrepeatable, because it is.

PET score validity and what the marks are used for

PET is not a recruitment by itself. The score becomes your entry ticket to the main examinations
that UPSSSC advertises afterwards, which is why the cut-off conversation is different from a normal
exam — you are not competing for a post here, you are qualifying for the right to apply.

That distinction changes how much a given score is worth. A percentile that comfortably clears the
shortlist for a clerical recruitment with thousands of posts may not clear the same year’s technical
recruitment with a few hundred. Because the shortlist is drawn fresh for each advertisement, there is
no single number to aim at, and anyone quoting a fixed PET qualifying mark is guessing. What the old
papers give you is the only thing actually under your control, which is a realistic estimate of the
score you can produce in two hours.

Which PET shift paper to solve first

If you have limited time, the order matters. The 2023 papers are the closest to the current
question style and they come with answers already marked, so they are the fastest to learn from. The
2021 booklets are the cleanest originals but have no answer key attached, so keep them for a
self-scored mock once you have a reference point.

Important Links

Written By: GD Sarkari Naukri Desk

Tracks central and state government recruitment notifications, admit cards, results and cut-offs for Global Drishti, verified directly against official recruitment portals and notification PDFs. Trusted by students and job aspirants nationwide.