M.Tech After GATE PE: IIT ISM, IIT Madras, IIT Guwahati Cut-offs

With no fresher PSU post on a GATE PE score in the adverts we checked (see our ONGC guide), admission is now the main use of the PE score. Three IITs run a petroleum M.Tech that admits the PE paper: IIT (ISM) Dhanbad (M.Tech Petroleum Engineering, 34 seats, PE paper only), IIT Madras (PE1 Petroleum Engineering, 15 seats for the PE paper) and IIT Guwahati (Petroleum Science and Technology, 40 seats shared by the CH and PE papers). IIT Kharagpur and IIT Bombay accept PE in safety, ocean and operations-research programmes, and CCMT lists PE in 87 programme groups at 34 institutes, none of them petroleum-named. This guide gives every published figure, converts the key ones into 2026 marks and has a lookup for your score.

IIT (ISM) and IIT Madras M.Tech brochures and cut-off files; CCMT 2026 seat mapping.

ISM’s programme is the one built for petroleum graduates: it needs a B.E./B.Tech in Petroleum or Applied Petroleum Engineering and only the GATE PE paper. It has 34 seats in 2026-27. ISM’s Chemical Engineering M.Tech also accepts the PE paper; its Fuel and Energy Engineering programme does not. ISM publishes cut-off files round by round, and they show how much the score falls between the first and last round.

The lesson from the round files is to stay in COAP until the last round. A UR candidate at 460 would have missed ISM’s first round in 2026 (542) and still been above its tenth (453).

IIT Madras admits graduates in five disciplines (CH, GG, ME, NA and PE) to its Petroleum Engineering M.Tech, but its Table 3 splits the seats by GATE paper and the PE paper has its own quota: 10 of the 14 HTTA seats and all 5 non-HTTA seats. Candidates on the CH, GG, ME or NM paper share the other 4 HTTA seats. HTTA is a half-time teaching assistantship of ₹12,400 a month for eligible students, subject to institute rules, with 8 hours of work a week; non-HTTA seats carry no assistance. From 2026 IIT Madras prints the PE-paper cut-off separately, so, like ISM’s, it is a PE-only figure.

Under Table 4 of the same brochure, a Petroleum Engineering graduate may also apply at IIT Madras to Clinical Engineering (CL1), Bioprocess Engineering (BT1), Computer Science and Engineering (CS1), Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DA1), a Mechanical programme (ME1) and the HS programme, each needing its own qualifying GATE paper.

CCMT (NITs, IIITs and other centrally funded institutes) lists the PE paper in 87 programme groups at 34 institutes in 2026. None is a petroleum programme; the closest are energy programmes. Every CCMT closing score pools all the papers a group admits, so it is not a PE-only figure. The OPEN floor is effectively the qualifying score of 350, which on the 2026 PE paper meant 40 marks.

Scores are what institutes publish, but you prepare in marks. On the 2026 PE field (qualifying mark 40, top average 66.67), the key figures convert as follows. A GATE score is valid for three years, so these are indicative only: a 2025 score of the same value needed fewer marks.