CUET PG Exam Pattern: 75 Questions, +4/-1 and Choosing Paper Codes

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Divide the time by the questions and you get 72 seconds a question (90 minutes is 5,400 seconds; 5,400 divided by 75), our arithmetic. For a candidate sitting two or three papers in the same exam period, each paper is its own 90-minute sitting in its own shift, so the time pressure does not accumulate across papers; the date-sheet gives each paper its own date and shift.

The scheme is simple until a question goes wrong. The bulletin handles three odd cases, in these words in substance. If a question turns out to have more than one correct option, 4 marks go to everyone who marked any of the correct options. If no option is correct, or the question is found wrong or is dropped, all candidates who appeared get 4 marks whether or not they attempted it. A question you leave unanswered or mark for review scores nothing.

NTA also publishes a provisional answer key and your recorded responses, and lets you challenge answers at Rs 200 a question; the result is then prepared on the final key. The result guide covers that process and what happened in 2026.

The table below shows what the scheme does to different strategies. Each cell is the raw marks for attempting that many questions at that accuracy, with the right and wrong counts rounded to whole questions (our arithmetic). The point to take from it is that accuracy and volume both pay, but accuracy pays faster: 65 attempts at 90 per cent give 230 marks, against 190 for 75 attempts at 70 per cent.

CUET PG is not one exam but 157 question papers. Appendix II of the bulletin groups them in six families, each with its own code prefix: Common (COQP), Languages (LAQP), Science (SCQP), Humanities (HUQP), M.Tech. and Higher Sciences (MTQP) and Acharya (ACQP). You choose the codes that the programmes you want ask for; the university decides the code, not you, and NTA warns that similar courses are evaluated under different codes at different universities (it gives Hindu Studies as the example).

The two codes that candidates for management and general-purpose programmes meet first are the General Paper (COQP11) and the General - Management paper (COQP12). Their syllabi read like aptitude tests: English comprehension, general awareness, reasoning and quantitative aptitude for COQP11, and English, mathematics, logical reasoning and data interpretation for COQP12. The syllabus guide links both PDFs.

NTA publishes, for every participating university, a PDF that lists its programmes, the question paper code for each, and the eligibility. We read all 198 and counted the codes. Five files could not be read as text, so the counts rest on 193 universities: 44 central, 40 state, 23 government institutions and 86 private and deemed. The Jamia Millia Islamia file is mostly scanned, so its entries are undercounted. Treat every number as a lower bound.

Three patterns follow. COQP12 (General - Management) is listed by 143 of 193 universities, ahead of any subject paper, and 75 of those are private or deemed universities; our reading is that management and other professional programmes there use it. 7 codes are listed by 100 or more universities, 32 by 50 or more, and 71 by ten or fewer; the narrow ones are mostly language and Acharya papers. And the MTQP04 paper (data science, AI, cyber security and computer science, engineering/technology) is the most widely used M.Tech. code, with a private-and-deemed majority.

What this does not tell you is how competitive a code is. A code listed by many universities has many seats behind it; a narrow code can still be the hardest one to enter. For cut-offs use the university's own score lists, as the university guide in this series does for the University of Delhi.

Start from the programmes, not the papers. List the universities and programmes you want, open each one's programme file on NTA's participating-universities page, and write down the code against each. Most candidates find that two or three codes cover their whole list. The fee depends on the number of papers (Rs 1,400 for up to two for a General candidate, Rs 700 for each extra), so every extra code should unlock a programme you would actually join.