Nursing Officer Recruitment Common Eligibility Test(NORCET)

About the exam

About NORCET

The NORCET exam is a hiring test, not an admission test, and the body that runs it is not the body that employs you. The AIIMS advertisement says so in plain words: the Examination Section at AIIMS New Delhi is merely an examination conducting body, and appointment in the participating organisation rests with that organisation's own competent authority. That single split decides your age bar, who checks your certificates, and whose service rules govern your probation. Two nurses can sit the same paper under the same notice and still answer to different recruitment rules.

NORCET selects Nursing Officers for a job, and the advertisement describes a post rather than a seat. The NORCET-11 advertisement, Notice No.103/2026 dated 24.07.2026 invited online applications for Nursing Officer posts at Level 07 in the Pay Matrix, Group-B, with a Grade Pay of Rs.4600 in the pre-revised pay band, for AIIMS New Delhi and other AIIMS as per the vacancies available in each institute.

Two sentences in that notice do more work than the rest of it put together. One states that the Examination Section is "merely an examination conducting body and appointment in respective participating organizations is subject to decision of respective competent authority". The other explains why nobody is kept on standby: there is no waiting list, "as NORCET has been planned to be conducted twice in a year". Read together, they mean the test is a common filter, and every consequence of clearing it belongs to the institute that hires you.

At a glance

NORCET highlights

Calendar

Important dates

NORCET runs as numbered editions, and each one publishes its own calendar inside its advertisement. These are the dates the NORCET-11 notice fixed.

The edition before it shows the rhythm. The NORCET-10 notice, Notice No.17/2026 dated 24.02.2026 put Stage I on 11th April, 2026 and Stage II on 30th April, 2026, so a candidate who missed that edition met the next one in the same year. Neither notice publishes a result date; both close the schedule with the same line about announcing results in due course. A result date does exist elsewhere: the AIIMS Tentative Schedule of Entrance Examinations for 2026, on the Key Dates page of the examination website, sets a result-notification date against each NORCET stage, and being tentative it can move.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The advertisement sets out two qualifying routes, and the second one carries a condition the first does not. Under the first route a candidate holds a B.Sc. (Hons.) Nursing or B.Sc. Nursing degree from an institute or university recognised by the Indian Nursing Council or a State Nursing Council, or a B.Sc. (Post-Certificate) or Post-Basic B.Sc. Nursing from such an institute or university, and is registered as a Nurse and Midwife with a State or the Indian Nursing Council. Under the second route a candidate holds a Diploma in General Nursing Midwifery from a recognised institute, board or council, is registered as a Nurse and Midwife, and adds two years of experience in a minimum 50 bedded hospital, as Notice No.103/2026 words it.

That experience clause is stricter than it looks. The notice's own remark says the two years must be acquired after obtaining the essential qualification, meaning after completing the residency period of the course, the declaration of the result and registration with the State or Indian Nursing Council, and it calls the requirement an essential criterion for all participating AIIMS.

Age is where the recruiting institute shows its hand. The NORCET-11 notice sets 18-30 years for all AIIMS, reckoned on the closing date of online registration, and then qualifies its own number: the limit applies subject to age relaxation as per the recruitment rules of the respective institutes and hospitals. Annexure-IV of the same notice puts it beyond doubt, describing every participating institute as an autonomous body and stating that AIIMS New Delhi, as the conducting body, holds no responsibility for recruitment rules, eligibility criteria or relaxation provisions at those institutes.

That clause reads "for all AIIMS" because AIIMS issues the notice in institute-specific copies, and a copy can carry a different age bar under the same notice number. The NORCET-9 advertisement for AIIMS, Notice No.268/2025 dated 22.07.2025 set 18-30 years, while the JIPMER copy of the same notice set 18-35 years for JIPMER Puducherry and JIPMER Yanam. Before you assume a cut-off age, find the copy of the notice your target institute published and read its age clause rather than the AIIMS one.

One caution the notice spells out: a SC, ST or OBC candidate who applies against unreserved vacancies gets no age relaxation and no relaxation in cut-off marks, and a reserved-category candidate who becomes eligible only through age relaxation is considered for reserved seats alone.

Step by step

Application process and fee

NORCET-11 took applications online and in no other form. The advertisement allowed submission only through the AIIMS examination website, required that no documents including the form be sent physically, and warned that any physical document regarding registration would be treated as null and void and destroyed. One standing rule catches repeat candidates: anyone already registered under One Time Registration in any previous examination must apply using the old ID, because an application made with a different registration ID is rejected.

The fee is not refunded once remitted, with one exception the notice names: the fee of SC and ST candidates who appear in the examination is refunded after the declaration of results, following verification of the SC or ST certificate. Category is not correctable from SC or ST to UR, OBC or EWS once the registration fee is paid, and no correction is entertained by email or letter.

Certificate dating is its own hurdle, and it is dated to the cycle rather than to the calendar year. For NORCET-11, Notice No.103/2026 required an OBC non-creamy-layer certificate valid for the financial year 2026-2027, resting on income up to the year ending 31.03.2026 and issued on or after 01.04.2026 and up to the closing date of 13.08.2026, and an EWS certificate resting on financial year 2025-2026 income and issued between 01.04.2026 and 13.08.2026. A candidate working in government, semi or quasi-government, a PSU, an autonomous body or any government-funded institution, including on a contract, must upload a No Objection Certificate, and failure to upload it by the notified time cancels the candidature.

Before the exam

Admit card and exam day

The NORCET-11 notice put the admit card on the AIIMS examination website for download on 09.09.2026, and says plainly that no admit card is sent by post. It also asks for the card back: the printed copy must be handed to the invigilator after the examination, failing which the candidate's performance is not considered.

What a candidate may carry is defined by what the notice treats as misconduct: possessing or using any mobile phone, even in switched-off mode, a pager, any electronic or programmable device, storage media such as a pen drive, a smart watch, a camera or a Bluetooth device, whether working or switched off. Refusing lawful frisking, obstructing frisking, talking during the examination or tampering with the equipment in the examination lab sit in the same list.

Candidates with a benchmark disability in blindness, locomotor disability affecting both arms, or cerebral palsy may use a scribe on a self-undertaking, and the advertisement allows compensatory time of not less than 20 minutes per hour of the examination. A candidate who brings an own scribe must keep that scribe's qualification one step below the minimum qualification for the test and in every case matriculate, and AIIMS reserves the right not to allow an own scribe.

Structure

Exam pattern

Stage I decides nothing about your rank. The advertisement states that NORCET Preliminary is a qualifying examination and will not be used for deciding merit or rank for final selection, which makes the second paper the only one that scores.

Both papers are locked section by section. The advertisement says each section is enabled in sequence, that access to the visible section is disabled once its set duration lapses and the next section activates automatically, and that a section never comes back for any action once the candidate has moved on. The paper submits itself at the end.

Where a paper runs in more than one shift, the notice applies the AIIMS normalisation procedure, Notice No. 35/2023 dated 20.01.2023. That notice converts raw marks into percentile scores within each shift, gives the highest scorer in every shift a percentile of 100, and computes percentiles to 7 decimal places to reduce ties.

What to study

Syllabus

There is no separate NORCET syllabus document to hunt for. Notice No.103/2026 disposes of the question in a single clause, saying the syllabus will be in accordance with the education qualification and experience mentioned in the eligibility section of the advertisement. The only breakdown it publishes is structural: 20 questions on general knowledge and aptitude in Stage I, the remaining 80 drawn from the syllabus of the nursing courses taught at the essential-qualification level, and a Stage II paper covering that entire syllabus through case scenario questions written to test nursing skills competency.

How to prepare

Preparation and books

Where an information bulletin would list reading, Notice No.103/2026 lists who has no standing to speak for AIIMS. It says AIIMS does not authorise any agent, coaching centre, social-media channel, WhatsApp or Telegram group or third-party website for recruitment, appointment, recommendation, document verification or payment other than the prescribed online application fee, and advises candidates to rely only on official notices published on the AIIMS examination website. It adds that where any summary, FAQ, help article or public communication differs from the official advertisement or corrigendum, the official document prevails.

No reading list follows, and none is promised, so the scope the notice does define is the one to work with: the nursing course the candidate already qualified in, plus general knowledge and aptitude in the first paper.

Where it is held

Exam centres

AIIMS does not publish a city list in the advertisement. The centres row of the NORCET-11 schedule reads "Cities all over India", and the notice fixed 03.09.2026, after the close of registration, as the date on which information about the city of a candidate's examination centre would appear. It also removes the appeal in advance: any request for a change of allocated examination centre "will be summarily rejected without any notice".

After the exam

Answer key

An answer key is not part of the process Notice No.103/2026 describes. The advertisement moves from the scheme of examination and the qualifying percentiles straight to the preparation of the merit list, providing nowhere for a published key or for objections to one. The previous edition bears that out: what the AIIMS NORCET-10 result page holds is the Stage-I result, the Stage-II result and the result of the online seat allocation.

Scores

Result and scorecard

Merit comes from one paper. The advertisement states that the merit list of qualified candidates is prepared on performance in Stage II NORCET Mains only, with the normalisation procedure applied where the paper ran in multiple shifts.

Ties are broken by a published order rather than by discretion: first by fewer wrong answers in Stage II, then by a higher Stage-I score, then by fewer wrong answers in Stage I, then in favour of the older candidate by date of birth, and finally by alphabetical order of the candidate's name, father's name and mother's name.

A rank is not an offer. The notice is explicit that submission of an application, acceptance of application status, issue of an admit card, appearance in the examination, qualifying, inclusion in the merit list, publication of a score or even provisional allocation confers no right to appointment. The NORCET-08 seat allocation result, Notification No. 69/2025 dated 20.05.2025 shows the sequence with dates on it: the list of provisionally qualified candidates came first, as result notification No. 57/2025 dated 06.05.2025, and the allocation was published later as a separate result under its own notification number.

Scores you need

Cutoff

For Stage I the NORCET-11 notice sets a percentile bar rather than a mark: 50 percentile for UR and EWS, 45 percentile for OBC and 40 percentile for SC and ST, with an additional 5 percentile relaxation for PWBD candidates irrespective of category, which puts UR and EWS PWBD at 45, OBC PWBD at 40 and SC and ST PWBD at 35. Stage II uses the same ladder in percentage marks: 50% for UR and EWS, 45% for OBC and 40% for SC and ST, again with an additional 5% relaxation for PWBD.

Clearing the Stage-I bar is necessary and not sufficient, and the notice says so rather than leaving it to be discovered. Notice No.103/2026 calls candidates for Stage II equal to 5 times the total seats in each of the UR, OBC, SC, ST and EWS categories, then adds every qualified PWBD candidate and everyone tied with the last candidate on the list. The same clause states that merely securing the qualifying percentile in Stage-I does not automatically entitle a candidate to be called for Stage-II. No category-wise closing score is published anywhere in the advertisement, and any figure circulating as this edition's cut-off did not come from it.

Getting a seat

Counselling and seat allotment

NORCET's equivalent of counselling is a choice-filling round followed by one online allocation, run by AIIMS on the Stage-II merit list. The advertisement warns that a candidate who does not exercise choices in the given window is not considered for selection at any stage, while a candidate who fills choices for only a few organisations is not considered for the organisations left blank. Allocation is made in order of merit out of the choices filled, there is generally only one round, and a candidate allocated a seat must join it, because failing to join cancels the candidature for that NORCET.

The NORCET-08 result shows what that looks like with dates attached. Allocation was made on the Stage-II rank, the choices exercised and the seats available in the candidate's category at each participating institute, after an application window that ran from 10.05.2025 to 16.05.2025 up to 5.00 pm, and allocated candidates then had to log in, accept the offer and upload an e-dossier between 24.05.2025 and 31.05.2025 up to 5.00 pm. The notification closes with the sentence that matters most to anyone waiting: "There is no any further round of allocation or waiting list."

Document verification belongs to the hiring institute, and it is a real filter. The Safdarjung Hospital notice dated 04.08.2026 called candidates shortlisted through NORCET-10 for verification on 13.08.2026, 14.08.2026, 17.08.2026, 18.08.2026 and 19.08.2026, asked for originals, one set of self-attested photocopies, five recent passport-size photographs and two copies of Character and Antecedents, and states that document verification confers no right to appointment. At the other end of the same edition, the AIIMS Bathinda notification dated 31 July 2026 published the eligible and ineligible list of NORCET-10 candidates allotted to it after original document verification held from 20 to 22 July 2026, gave a candidate found ineligible a final opportunity to appear in person on 06 August 2026 at 09:00 AM, and said appointment letters would be issued separately.

Appointment itself turns on more than paper. The advertisement makes it subject to verification of eligibility, documents, certificates, identity, character and antecedents and medical fitness, including biometric verification against the biometric data captured during the examination, and leaves probation, seniority, transfer and every other service matter to the rules of the institute that appoints.

Where it is accepted

Participating institutes

Annexure-I of Notice No.103/2026 lists the AIIMS where posts may be notified in due course, and it reaches from Avantipora in Jammu and Kashmir to Mangalagiri in Andhra Pradesh, taking in Bathinda, Bhopal, Bilaspur, Bhubaneswar, Deoghar, Gorakhpur, Guwahati, Kalyani, Nagpur, New Delhi, Patna, Rae Bareli, Raipur, Rewari, Rishikesh and Vijaypur along the way, with AIIMS-CAPFIMS listed separately at the end. The notice separates that last entry out deliberately: AIIMS-CAPFIMS does not refer to AIIMS New Delhi, its appointees are posted only at the CAPFIMS campus at Maidangarhi in New Delhi, they carry separate seniority and career progression under CAPFIMS policies, and they are not eligible for transfer to AIIMS New Delhi as part of this common recruitment.

The AIIMS are not the whole roster. Annexure-V of the same notice, its vacancy table, carries rows for JIPMER Puducherry, ESIC New Delhi, Safdarjung Hospital, Dr. RML Hospital, the National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases (NITRD) and the Central Institute of Psychiatry (CIP), Ranchi alongside the AIIMS, plus two hospitals it names only by their initials, RHTC and KSCH. Filling choices therefore means choosing between employers rather than campuses, and the way an employer is advertised varies. The NORCET-08 allocation result shows the shape of it: VMMC and Safdarjung Hospital were covered by the AIIMS advertisement notification itself, while the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute in Kolkata, NITRD, the All India Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Mumbai and CIP Ranchi each had a recruitment notice of their own, under its own number and date. If one of those is your target, its notice is the document that governs your eligibility.

The vacancy count also moves while the cycle runs. Annexure-V splits its institute-wise table by category and by gender, and its own note in Notice No.103/2026 says the number of posts mentioned is tentative and liable to change, and that institutes not currently declaring vacancies may do so subsequently. Annexure-I makes the same point from the other side: vacancies are reported in due course before the closing date of application, and any published vacancy may be withdrawn at any stage of the recruitment process. AIIMS then did exactly that, posting addenda on the NORCET-11 notification page that bring AIIMS Madurai into the recruitment with vacancies and add an AIIMS Rishikesh vacancy. One standing allocation rule sits underneath all of it: following a decision at the 4th meeting of the CIB held on 27th July 2019, 80% of seats are reserved for females and 20% for males at participating AIIMS.

Get help

Contact

Contact with AIIMS runs one way and on AIIMS's own schedule. Telephonic queries and written requests made before the scheduled date in the information brochure, about matters such as receipt of an application, its acceptance or the hosting of admit cards, are not entertained, and enquiries relating to NORCET-11 go through "RAISE A QUERY" on the candidate dashboard at the AIIMS examination website. The advertisement is signed by the Assistant Controller (Exams), Examination Section, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110029.

Source

Official links

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Edition number, exact dates, vacancies, stage-wise marks/question counts/durations, cutoffs, answer keys and results vary by edition. Per-stage totals left null as they have varied. Anything per-cycle here is stated for the cycle it names and is taken from the conducting body's own notification; confirm it on the official website before acting on it. Expertie does not conduct any exam, process applications or charge fees.

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