STUDY MATERIAL · GATE CS
GATE C Programming previous year questions and notes
Every Programming in C question from 10 GATE papers (2018–2026), solved step by step and checked against the organising institute’s official answer key — with notes for each topic, a formula sheet and practice questions.
- previous-year questions
- 34previous-year questions
- worked solutions, checked against the key
- 34worked solutions, checked against the key
- GATE papers, 2018–2026
- 10GATE papers, 2018–2026
- topics with notes
- 4topics with notes
TOPICS
Four topics, in the order they are taught
Cut from the official GATE 2027 syllabus. Each topic has notes, the formulas you need, every previous-year question on it with a checked solution, and practice questions.
- TOPIC 01
C fundamentals: types, operators, expressions and control flow
Programming in C fundamentals covers how a value is stored (its type and size), how it is transformed before and during an operation (promotions, conversions, wraparound and overflow), how operators combine values (precedence, associativity, short-circuiting and sequencing), and how control constructs decide what runs next (switch fall-through, loops with break and continue).
7 previous-year questions · 11 marks · 5 practice
- TOPIC 02
Pointers, arrays and strings in C
Pointers, arrays and strings are where C's memory model shows through its syntax.
11 previous-year questions · 16 marks · 7 practice
- TOPIC 03
Functions, parameter passing, scope and storage classes
This topic covers how C functions communicate with their callers and how their variables live and die.
7 previous-year questions · 9 marks · 5 practice
- TOPIC 04
Recursion: tracing recursive programs
Recursion lets a function solve a problem by calling itself on a smaller instance until a base case is reached.
9 previous-year questions · 16 marks · 6 practice
WHERE THE QUESTIONS FALL
34 questions, by topic and year
Counts across the CS papers of each year. A count of what was asked, not a forecast of what will be. The topic tags are IAE’s reading of each question, and every question links back to its paper.
| Topic | 2018 | 2020 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C basics | 1 | · | 1 | · | 3 | 2 | · | 7 |
| Pointers & arrays | 1 | 2 | 2 | · | 2 | 3 | 1 | 11 |
| Functions & scope | 1 | · | · | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 7 |
| Recursion | 2 | 1 | · | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 9 |
GATE CSE question papers with solutions: 2026 Set 1, 2026 Set 2, 2025 Set 1, 2025 Set 2, 2024 Set 1, 2024 Set 2, 2023, 2022, 2020, 2018
The 2019 and 2021 papers are not included: the copies IAE hosts are image scans. GATE 2023 is read from IIT Kanpur's own copy of the paper and its answer key (via the Internet Archive), which numbers the CS questions Q.11 to Q.65. For 2024, 2025 and 2026 both sessions (CS1 and CS2) are included.
How we check solutions: editorial standards.
C Programming formulas by topic
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THE OFFICIAL SYLLABUS
What each paper lists under Programming in C
Verbatim from the GATE 2027 syllabus PDF: the first two items of CS Section 4, “Programming and Data Structures”. The rest of that section — arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, binary search trees, binary heaps and graphs — is on the Data Structures and Algorithms page.
GATE CS
Programming in C. Recursion.
IF YOU WOULD RATHER TALK IT THROUGH