What a wrong answer costs in GATE, by question type

This post sets out what a wrong answer costs on each of the three GATE question types — MCQ, MSQ and NAT — and how many of a paper's 85 subject marks have historically fallen into each type, paper by paper. MCQ, MSQ and NAT are the three question types used across these papers, and the tables below track how the 55 questions after General Aptitude, worth those 85 subject marks, have split across the three types in each year.

What a wrong answer costs, by question type

The rule is printed in the GATE 2027 Information Brochure, printed page 4: "For a 1-mark MCQ, 1/3 will be deducted for a wrong answer. Likewise, for a 2-mark MCQ, 2/3 will be deducted for a wrong answer. There is no negative marking for wrong answers to MSQ and NAT questions. There is no partial marking for any question." No question type carries partial marks — an answer earns the marks for full credit or it does not; the brochure states there is no partial marking for any question.

Marks exposed to negative marking: MCQ marks per paper

MCQ marks are the marks exposed to this deduction. Among the papers counted, MCQ marks have ranged from 32 to 51 of the 85 subject marks in GATE EC, from 27 to 55 in GATE EE, from 25 to 52 in GATE IN, and from 27 to 48 in GATE CS across single-session years and both 2024–2026 sessions. In GATE BT, MCQ marks ranged from 25 to 56.

MSQ marks per paper

NAT marks per paper

MSQ and NAT marks carry no deduction for a wrong answer, as the brochure states above. Among the counted papers, MSQ marks first appear in 2022 for GATE EC, IN, BT and CS, and in 2023 for GATE EE. 2021 is not among the counted papers for any paper, and 2019 is counted only for GATE BT (from IIT Madras's own copy), whose 2019 paper has no MSQ questions. So this says nothing about when GATE introduced MSQ as a question type. An MSQ question is scored as a whole — no partial marks, as the brochure states — so there is no credit in between a fully correct set of ticks and an incorrect one.

The arithmetic of a guess on an MCQ

A guess on an MCQ with all four options still in play is worth zero on average: a correct guess earns the full mark one time in four, and a wrong guess loses a third of a 1-mark question (or two-thirds of a 2-mark question) the other three times, and the two cancel out. Ruling options out changes the arithmetic: with three options left, the worked expected value is +1/9 of a mark on a 1-mark question and +2/9 on a 2-mark question; with two options left, it is +1/3 and +2/3. This is worked arithmetic under one stated assumption — that the remaining options are equally likely to be right — and it describes no candidate's actual paper or result, and nothing about whether guessing is worth doing in a particular case.

For the full marking rule beyond question-type deductions, there is the marking post. NAT answers are checked against a printed tolerance, covered in NAT answer ranges. The three question types as they appear in a real paper can be seen in the previous-year papers for GATE EC, GATE EE, GATE IN, GATE BT and GATE CS. The study library carries subject pages built from these same papers: General Aptitude, Engineering Mathematics, Control Systems, Networks and Data Structures and Algorithms.