Over 12 lakh grads appeared for GATE this year

By Ruchi Shrimali

More than 12 lakh students appeared for GATE in 2012. The Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) is an all-India examination conducted jointly by IISc Bangalore and the seven IITs for admission to their PG programmes in engineering, technology, architecture and pharmacy. It was conducted on 12th February, 2012 in the morning session of 9 am to 12 pm.

The paper largely followed the pattern of the previous year. It had 65 objective multiple-choice questions with a maximum score of 100 marks. Each question had four options. GATE has negative marking and 1/3 marks are deducted for every wrong answer.

In GATE 2012, the breakup of the common test was as follows:

• Questions on engineering mathematics were for 15 marks,
• Questions on general aptitude (verbal ability and numerical ability) were for 15 marks, and
• Questions on core engineering subjects were for 70 marks.

The difficulty level of the GATE test for Mechanical Engineering was similar to what it was last year. The weightage of marks allotted to manufacturing and production engineering increased from 12% to 16% this year, while the weightage allotted to thermodynamics dropped slightly 19% to 13%. Weightage of subjects like maths, general aptitude and applied mechanics and design did not see many changes.

In the ME paper, about 21% questions were from manufacturing section. Very few questions were asked from thermal science (which includes thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and heat transfer). Questions from mechanics and design were considered most difficult in this paper.

The GATE paper for CS/ IT students is said to be slightly tougher than GATE 2011. Students were surprised to see that there were no questions from software engineering this year. Most of the questions were from DBMS, data structure, algorithm and computer network.

The DBMS and data structure questions were said to be the easiest ones. There were few questions from compiler design too. Questions from Theory of Computation and DMGT were considered to be the toughest ones by academic experts.

The weightage of marks allotted to computer networks increased from 6% to 13% this year while weightage of marks allotted to computer organisation decreased from 16% to 3%. There was not much change in the weightage allotted to maths, compiler design and digital from last year.

In view of the large number of candidates who have taken GATE this year, it is expected that cutoffs for both the papers will be higher this year.

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