UGC NET Data Interpretation Questions: 20 Worked Problems

The NTA December 2026 bulletin lists Paper I as 50 compulsory questions for 100 marks and Paper II as 100 for 200, both inside one 180-minute sitting. It awards two marks for a correct answer and has no negative marking for an incorrect one. It does not give a separate official clock for Unit VII. A fixed “two minutes per DI question” rule is therefore a personal pacing choice, not an instruction from NTA. The December 2026 bulletin is the controlling source for this sitting; check any later NTA notice for a change.

Before doing arithmetic, underline both the numerator and the denominator in the question. A university may report “Commerce admitted as a share of all admits,” which means 120 of 745; “Commerce admission rate,” which means 120 of 600; or “Commerce growth in admits,” which means the change from 100 to 120 against the old 100. These are three different questions about the same cell. A correct calculator entry with the wrong whole is still a wrong answer.

Fictional university example. Each application and admitted figure is a count of people. Admission rate means admitted divided by applications in the same row and year. Read the four departments before the total row; the total is supplied so you can verify your sums.

The bar chart makes one useful point visible: departments differ greatly in applicant counts, so an unweighted average of their admission rates is not the overall university rate. If all four department rates were the same, the shortcut would work; here Arts is 25%, Science and Education are 30%, and Commerce is 20%. The mix of applicants therefore matters. This is a weighted-average problem, even though the word “weighted” may never appear in a test prompt.

Fictional three-course series. Each cell gives “enrolled / completed” for that one course and year; a person is counted only inside the stated year. A completion rate is completed ÷ enrolled for the same row and course. This data deliberately makes Course A’s 2025 rate differ from B and C, so that an average of three percentages cannot replace a pooled calculation.

Imagine a fictional research office dividing a ₹24 lakh budget into the categories below. The table supplies both share and angle so a screen reader, AMP reader or text-only reader can solve every question. A pie chart uses 360° for the whole; one percent is 3.6°. An angle is not money until you multiply the corresponding share by the total budget.

The checker below accepts part and whole in two periods. It calculates each share, their percentage-point difference and relative growth in the part count. For the default Commerce-admitted example, the part count grows 20% (100 to 120) while its share among all admitted people falls from 16.67% to 16.11%, about 0.56 percentage points. Growth in a count and change in its share can point in opposite directions when the whole grows faster.

When a set is slow, identify the bottleneck rather than saying only “DI is weak.” An error log can distinguish misread axes, wrong denominator, arithmetic slip, poor estimate and time spent transcribing numbers. Repair one type at a time. The next practice set should use different surface data: a line chart if you practised a table, or two subgroup rates if you practised a pie chart. Repeating the same twenty numbers until you remember their answers will give false confidence.

Our published Paper I booklet audit classified 340 questions in six official UGC NET Bureau booklets, one set each from June 2015 through July 2018. It found 34 Unit VII questions across the six sets. In the June 2015, December 2015, July 2016 and January 2017 sets, there were six DI questions in each; the November 2017 and July 2018 sets had five each. Every set used one or two shared data displays rather than six unrelated stand-alone numericals. These are auditable historical observations, not a claim about the current NTA computer-based paper. The UGC syllabus note is the current basis for five two-mark questions per module.