What This Page Covers
SSC CGL Tier 1 2026 runs from 30 September to 30 October, with three to four shifts a day across the whole month. This page collects the shift-wise analysis for that window — section-by-section difficulty, the topics that appeared, and the attempt ranges reported by candidates — and is updated through the cycle as shifts are conducted. Nothing here is posted before a shift has taken place: attempt counts and difficulty ratings published in advance of an exam are guesses, and acting on a guessed cutoff is worse than having no number at all.
Shift Log
Analysis is added after each exam day, newest first. The first entry publishes on 30 September 2026, after Shift 1. Until then, the sections below cover what the paper is and how to read the analysis when it arrives.
Try 3 real SSC CGL questions
Tap an answer to see if you're right, with the solution. No signup.
Reasoning · SSC CGL 2018
If BACK is coded as 11312 and CAKE as 51113. So how will MADE be coded?
Quant · SSC CGL 2022
If x + 1/x = 5, then x² + 1/x² = ?
English · SSC CGL 2021
Select the most appropriate SYNONYM of the given word. Retaliate
The Paper You Are Analysing
Tier 1 is a single 60-minute computer-based paper of 100 questions carrying 200 marks, split across four sections of 25 questions each — General Intelligence and Reasoning, General Awareness, Quantitative Aptitude and English Comprehension. Every correct answer is worth 2 marks and every wrong one costs 0.50, and there is no sectional timing, so the whole hour is yours to allocate. That last point is what makes shift analysis worth reading at all: if reasoning ran easy and quant ran long in a shift, the useful information is not the difficulty label but how candidates split the 60 minutes. The full exam pattern and marking scheme has the detail.
What "Good Attempts" Means, and What It Does Not
A good-attempt figure is the number of questions candidates in a shift attempted with reasonable confidence — it is a crowd-sourced description of how the paper felt, not a target and not a cutoff. Three things are worth knowing before you use one.
- 1It says nothing about accuracy. Ninety attempts at 70% accuracy scores below seventy attempts at 90% once negative marking is applied. Attempts without accuracy is half a number.
- 2It comes from whoever chose to post, usually the confident ones, within hours of the shift. The sample is not the shift.
- 3It is a description of one shift, and your shift is a different paper. Over a month-long window there are more than a hundred distinct papers.
Why You Cannot Compare Shifts Directly
Because SSC CGL Tier 1 runs across many shifts with different question papers, raw scores are not comparable and SSC applies normalization to put every candidate on one scale. A harder shift is not a penalty and an easier shift is not an advantage; that is the entire point of the mechanism. So "our shift was the hardest" is not the disadvantage it feels like on the day, and the 80 marks someone reports from an easy Shift 2 is not a benchmark for your Shift 4. How normalization and cutoffs actually work is worth reading once before the analyses start rolling in, because it changes what the numbers on this page can tell you.
How to Read Analysis If Your Exam Is Still Ahead
With shifts spread over a month, most candidates will read several analyses before sitting their own paper. That is a genuine advantage if used narrowly.
- 1Read for topic distribution, not difficulty. Which arithmetic chapters came up, how many puzzle sets appeared, whether the English section leaned on vocabulary or grammar — that is actionable. "Moderate to difficult" is not.
- 2Treat patterns across several shifts as signal and any single shift as noise. One shift with four DI sets does not mean yours will have four.
- 3Do not redesign your preparation in the last week on the strength of an analysis. Adjust the order of your revision at most.
- 4Then go and practise the topics that keep appearing. A timed SSC CGL mock test drawn from over 13,000 exam-pattern questions with solutions will tell you more about your own weak sections than any shift report will.
How to Read Analysis If You Have Already Sat the Paper
Resist scoring yourself against other people’s attempt counts. The honest read on your own paper comes from the response sheet SSC publishes after the window, not from the corridor. Mark down what you attempted and roughly how confident you were, then leave it alone until the answer key is out and score yourself properly from the response sheet. If Tier 2 is a realistic possibility, starting Tier 2 preparation beats waiting for a result that is weeks away.
A Note on Sources
Difficulty ratings and attempt ranges published here are candidate-reported and are labelled as such. Question counts, marks and the exam schedule come from SSC’s own notices on ssc.gov.in. No expected cutoff is published on this page until SSC releases the answer key and response sheets, because an expected cutoff before that point is a number with nothing behind it.