UGC NET Paper 1 Syllabus Unit-Wise: 10 Units, 5 Questions Each, Counted

The syllabus is a UGC NET Bureau document, referred to by the NTA bulletin (section 2.3). Each unit is a "module"; the table condenses its official scope. The wording of the note is: "Five questions each carrying 2 marks are to be set from each Module." A second note says that when graphical or pictorial questions are set for sighted candidates, a passage with an equal number of questions and weightage is set for visually impaired candidates.

Weightage can only come from question papers or from keys that say which question tests what. Here is what each era publishes.

We read the June 2014 and December 2014 booklets and left them out of the count: their unit blocks come in a different order from the later booklets (a communication block opens the December 2014 paper, for example) and several questions straddle two units, so a count would rest on judgement calls we cannot defend. Sessions before June 2014 were not counted; extending the table to them is a later job.

The only deviation is December 2015. Question 18, on the objectives of student evaluation of teachers, sits between the comprehension passage (questions 13 to 17) and the communication block (19 to 24), but it tests Unit I (evaluation systems), so we count Unit I as 7 and Unit III as 5 for that booklet. If you count by position instead, every unit has exactly 6 in every 60-question booklet and 5 in every 50-question booklet. By position the spread is zero; by topic it is two questions across the 340 (33 to 35).

In January 2017, the Teaching Aptitude block comes last (questions 55 to 60), and in July 2016 two Unit I questions (59 and 60) are placed at the end. Unit order inside a booklet is not fixed, which matters if you practise with one paper from one year only.

Equal marks per unit does not mean equal difficulty or equal predictability. Unit by unit, these are the regularities we found in the six booklets, with the question numbers so that you can check each against the PDFs. They are our grouping of official questions, not an NTA statement, and they describe pen-and-paper papers that ended in 2018.

Three of these are structural and the most useful for planning. Comprehension is always one passage, so it rewards reading speed, not a syllabus list. Data interpretation is always built from whole data sets, so five or six marks hang on reading one table well. Indian logic is named in the syllabus but was not asked in any of the 340 questions, while square-of-opposition questions came up in every booklet: study what has been asked first and the named-but-unasked strands once the rest is secure.

Ten equal units means the cheapest marks are in the units where a day of work changes your accuracy most. Units V, VI and VII are formula and method units that reward drilling; Units VIII, IX and X are fact units that reward revision; Units III and IV reward reading and reasoning habits that no syllabus list can give you. All are worth the same 10 marks. The tracker below uses only the official strands of each unit, so a tick means that strand of the official text has been covered.