The Civil Service Commission publishes the scope of the Career Service Examination in two places, and only two: the Scope of Examination section of the examination announcement issued before each application period, and the Scope of Examination and Other Information section of the examination advisory issued a few weeks before test day. Everything else circulating online is reconstruction.
Here is what those documents say, what they leave out, and how to read the difference.
The published scope
Four blocks appear on both levels, and a fifth block differs by level.
Common to both levels
General Information (in English)
- Philippine Constitution
- Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees (RA 6713)
- Peace and Human Rights Issues and Concepts
- Environment Management and Protection
Verbal Ability (in English and Filipino)
- Word meaning
- Sentence completion
- Error recognition
- Sentence structure
- Paragraph organization
- Reading comprehension
Numerical Ability (in English)
- Basic operations
- Number sequence
- Word problems
Professional level only
Analytical Ability (in English)
- Word analogy
- Symbolic logic / abstract reasoning
- Identifying assumptions and drawing conclusions
- Data interpretation
Sub-Professional level only
Clerical Ability (in English)
- Filing
- Spelling
That is the entire published list. Four topics under General Information, six under Verbal, three under Numerical, and then four under Analytical or two under Clerical depending on your level.
The language tags matter. Verbal Ability is the only block marked as running in both English and Filipino. Everything else is marked English. If you have been drilling Filipino grammar as a separate subject, it is not one, it lives inside Verbal Ability.
For help deciding which level to sit in the first place, see Professional vs Sub-Professional.
Item counts, time, and the 20 items that are not questions
From CSC Examination Advisory No. 02, s. 2026, issued for the 8 March 2026 CSE-PPT:
| Professional | Sub-Professional | |
|---|---|---|
| Test proper items | 150 | 145 |
| Examinee Descriptive Questionnaire (EDQ) | 20 | 20 |
| Total | 170 | 165 |
| Time limit | 3 hours, 10 minutes | 2 hours, 40 minutes |
| Test proper | 8:00 a.m. to 11:10 a.m. | 8:00 a.m. to 10:40 a.m. |
| Pre- and post-exam activities | Approximately one hour before and one hour after the test proper | Approximately one hour before and one hour after the test proper |
The Examinee Descriptive Questionnaire is the detail most reviewers get wrong. The CSC footnotes it as "pertaining to personal data of examinees." It is 20 shaded items about you, not 20 questions you can fail. When someone says the Professional exam is 170 items, the number is right and the implication is wrong: 150 items decide your rating.
That also changes the pacing arithmetic. 3 hours 10 minutes is 190 minutes. Spread across all 170 shaded items that is roughly 67 seconds each, but the EDQ takes a fraction of that, so your working budget on the 150 scored items is a little over a minute apiece. On the Sub-Professional level, 160 minutes across 145 scored items plus the EDQ works out similarly tight.
Add the CSC's note about pre- and post-examination activities and the day is longer than the time limit suggests. Gates at testing venues close at 7:45 a.m. per the same advisory, and examinees are told to arrive no later than 6:30 a.m. or as required by the CSC Regional or Field Office. Budget the whole morning.
What the CSC does not publish
This is the useful half of the answer, because the gaps are where bad reviewers fill in confident numbers.
Per-subtest item counts. The CSC gives you the topic list and the totals. It does not say how many of the 150 scored items are vocabulary, or analogy, or reading comprehension. If a reviewer promises "40 items of Numerical Ability," that figure came from examinee recollection, not from the CSC.
The raw-score-to-rating conversion. The passing grade is stated as "a general rating of at least 80.00." The announcement does not explain how a number of correct answers becomes a general rating, so nobody outside the CSC can tell you how many items you must get right. Treat 80.00 as a rating threshold, not as a percentage of items.
Specific statutes under General Information. The scope names the Philippine Constitution and RA 6713 explicitly. For "peace and human rights issues and concepts" and "environment management and protection," it names no statutes at all. Reviewers that hand you a list of ten environmental laws to memorise are making an editorial choice about what to cover. It may be a reasonable choice, but it is not the CSC telling you what is on the test.
Watch for the reverse problem too: topics that appear in reviewers but not in the current announcement. Older syllabi circulating online add "rights of persons with disabilities" and a broad "Philippine governance and public administration" heading to General Information. Neither appears in the published scope for recent cycles, which names four topics and stops. They are reasonable background reading. They are not confirmed coverage, and treating them as such costs hours you could have spent on Verbal and Numerical.
The actual items. Obviously. And attempts to reconstruct them are dangerous rather than merely useless, which is covered further below.
How the scope translates into what you should study
General Information is the only genuinely memorisable block. Two of the four topics have a single authoritative text each:
- The 1987 Philippine Constitution
- RA 6713, whose Section 4 sets out eight norms of conduct (commitment to public interest, professionalism, justness and sincerity, political neutrality, responsiveness to the public, nationalism and patriotism, commitment to democracy, and simple living) and whose Section 7 enumerates prohibited acts and transactions
Read the primary texts. They are short, free, and unambiguous, which is more than can be said for most summaries of them.
Verbal Ability rewards volume over technique. Word meaning and error recognition are recall. Paragraph organization and reading comprehension are procedure. The bilingual element means you should be reading and answering in Filipino as well, not only in English.
Numerical Ability is arithmetic under a no-calculator rule. Basic operations, number sequence, and word problems. The constraint, not the mathematics, is what makes this block hard.
Analytical Ability is the block that decides most Professional-level ratings, because it is the least trainable by cramming. Word analogy and symbolic logic reward pattern practice over weeks; data interpretation rewards being fast at reading tables.
Clerical Ability on the Sub-Professional level is filing and spelling. Filing means alphabetical and numerical sequencing rules. It is narrow and it is learnable, which is one of the few genuine arguments for that level. It is also the reason the Sub-Professional paper is not simply the Professional paper with easier questions — the two levels swap one whole content area, so drilling abstract reasoning for a Sub-Professional sitting is wasted effort.
Method for turning this into a study plan sits in civil service exam reviewers: what to use, and the drilling side in how to use practice questions.
Exam-day rules that change how you answer
These come from the same advisory and they affect technique, not just conduct.
- No calculator of any type, including watch calculators. Also no tablets, books, dictionaries, or other printed material. Violations mean cancellation of the examination or results.
- Black ball pen only. The advisory is explicit: pencils, gel pens, sign pens, fountain pens, friction pens, and other ink colours are not allowed. This matters more than it sounds, because it means you cannot erase an answer. Decide before you mark.
- Scratch work only in the test booklet. Not on scrap paper, not on your skin or clothing, and not in the answer sheet margins or back page.
- Your examinee number must be shaded correctly. The advisory warns that failure to properly shade or mark the examinee number on the answer sheet invalidates the examination, and that using an examinee number other than the one assigned may constitute examinee number switching under RA 9416, the Anti-Cheating Law.
- No phones, smart watches, or cameras at your seat, and bags go to the front of the room, not under your chair.
Write down your examinee number on your application receipt or CSC official receipt during the preliminaries. You need it later to pull your individual rating from the Online Civil Service Examination Result Generation System (OCSERGS).
A note on leaked items
The CSC's warning section lists sharing and disseminating test questions and suggested answers online among the acts it denounces, and cheating in a civil service examination is criminally and administratively punishable under RA 9416. Sets of "actual questions" circulating on social media are a legal problem for whoever posted them and an accuracy problem for you. The published scope is the only reliable description of the test.
Where to go next
Once you know the coverage, the next questions are usually how to get registered and how hard the bar actually is. Those are in how to apply for the civil service exam and civil service exam passing rate.
Sources
- Civil Service Commission, Examination Advisory No. 02, s. 2026 — School Assignment and Important Reminders for the 08 March 2026 CSE-PPT (scope, item counts, time limits, exam-day rules): https://csc.gov.ph/phocadownload/userupload/erpo/advisories/2026/ExamAdvisory_2026_02_School%20Assignment%20Impt%20Reminders%20for%2008%20March%202026%20CSE-PPT%20Sgd.pdf
- Civil Service Commission, Examination Announcement No. 03, s. 2026 — Conduct of the 09 August 2026 CSE-PPT (scope of examination, passing grade, prohibited acts, warning on cheating): https://www.csc.gov.ph/examination-advisories/examination-announcement-no-03-s-2026-conduct-of-career-service-examination-pen-and-paper-test-cse-ppt-for-professional-and-subprofessional-levels-09-august-2026
- Republic Act No. 6713, Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees (Sections 4 and 7), via the Arellano Law Foundation: https://lawphil.net/statutes/repacts/ra1989/ra_6713_1989.html
- Civil Service Commission, "CSC Releases Results of 8 March 2026 Civil Service Exam" (OCSERGS, rating threshold): https://www.csc.gov.ph/csc-releases-results-of-8-march-2026-civil-service-exam
