Political Science was the most popular optional subject in CSS 2025, drawing 7,929 candidates, yet only 146 of them were eventually allocated, which works out to an overall conversion of just 1.84%. The striking thing about those numbers is that they are not the result of a difficult paper. Candidates clear Political Science comfortably; what they struggle to do is finish high enough in a field this crowded to actually secure a seat.
With a mean of 48% against the CSS optional-subject average of 43.5%, Political Science looks, on the surface, like a comfortably above-average paper, and in purely academic terms it is. That framing misses the point, though, because the figure that decides a candidate's fate is not the average score but the rank required to claim one of just 146 seats among nearly eight thousand competitors. A mean above the field tells you the paper is passable; it tells you nothing about whether you can finish high enough to be allocated. The benchmark that actually matters here is not the 33% floor or the 43.5% average but the score of the last candidate to make the cut, which almost certainly sits well north of 48%.
Of the 7,929 who appeared, 286 passed the written stage, a 3.61% pass rate, and 146 of those passers were ultimately allocated. Because the mean score of 48% sits well above the 33% threshold, the heavy attrition here is clearly happening at the overall merit stage rather than within the paper itself. In other words, candidates are clearing Political Science and then losing their seats on the strength of their full CSS scorecard, which is why preparing this subject in isolation rarely pays off.
At 48% of the 200 available marks, the mean clears the 33% passing threshold with room to spare, and the median of 51.5% sitting just above it tells us the distribution leans slightly to the left, with a tail of weaker scorers pulling the average down. The standard deviation of 29 marks, equivalent to about 14.5 percentage points, is wide enough that a candidate scoring one full standard deviation below the mean lands at 33.5%, barely on the right side of the line. That makes this a moderate-risk paper to score in: the typical candidate passes, but anyone having an off day can slip into failing territory. The deeper problem is that in a contest of 7,929 people for 146 seats, a score of 48% is thoroughly ordinary, and the candidates who actually get allocated are scoring well beyond it. Put plainly, this left skew means the average is being pulled down by the weakest scripts, so the median candidate at 51.5% is the more honest picture of typical performance than the 48% mean.
Punjab dominates the allocation table with 96 of the 146 seats, almost two-thirds of the total, followed at a distance by KPK with 18 and Sindh Rural with 16. Every remaining province sits in single digits, and that concentration says less about innate provincial talent than about where the dense Political Science coaching infrastructure happens to be, which leaves candidates from smaller provinces competing against a more heavily prepared pool.
Women took 78 of the 146 allocated seats, a 53.4% share that runs slightly ahead of the CSS-wide female allocation rate of 50.7%. The gap is small but it points in a consistent direction, since female candidates who survive the written filter in this subject convert to allocation at a marginally better rate than their male counterparts. This is not a subject designed to favour women so much as a reflection of how well-prepared the women who reach that stage tend to be.
Political Science makes sense for candidates who genuinely know the discipline and can reliably score in the 55 to 65% range on a 200-mark paper, because at that level the popularity of the subject stops being a liability. For anyone else the data reads as a warning rather than an invitation, since the largest candidate pool in the examination is fighting over a fixed and modest number of seats, and being merely average is a quiet route to missing the merit cut. The right reason to pick this subject is that you are strong in it, not that everyone around you has picked it too.