Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to techniques for encoding and decoding bits of information using cyclic redundancy check (CRC) concatenated polar encoding and decoding. The CRC concatenated polar encoding techniques may avoid transmission of dummy bits. A method generally includes obtaining the bits of information to be transmitted. The method includes performing CRC outer encoding of the bits of information using an even-weighted generator polynomial to produce CRC encoded bits. The method includes performing polar inner encoding of the CRC encoded bits to generate a codeword. The method includes discarding a first code bit at a beginning of the codeword. The shortened codeword is transmitted over a wireless medium. In another method, bit-level scrambling is performed on the CRC encoded bits before the polar encoding to avoid generating a dummy bit. In another method, only odd-weighted generator polynomials are selected to avoid generating the dummy bit.