GATE Physics Section-wise Weightage 2023–2026 from Official Keys

Weightage tables for GATE Physics are everywhere, and most of them are guesses: ranges like “12–15 marks” that nobody can trace to a paper. This guide is built the slow way. We took the official PH question papers and final answer keys for 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, all 220 Physics questions, and sorted each one into the 11 sections of the 2027 syllabus. That gives the marks each section actually carried, how the mix of MCQ, MSQ and NAT has swung, which topics come back year after year, and a few traps in the answer keys that change how you should answer.

Our counts from the official PH papers and final keys.

Each Physics question (Q11 to Q65) was assigned to one 2027 section by its main idea. Where a question mixes two areas, for example a Fermi-energy calculation that belongs as much to Statistical Mechanics as to Solid State, we used the section whose syllabus phrase fits best, and recorded the choice. General Aptitude (Q1 to Q10, 15 marks) is left out of every section table, so each year totals 55 questions and 85 marks. Because the two new 2027 sections did not exist before, a question now counted under Optical Physics was in Atomic Physics or Electromagnetic Theory in its own year.

Four readings, all ours. Quantum Mechanics is the only section that never dropped below 11 marks, and it reached 15 in 2026. Nuclear and Particle Physics is the most volatile: 14 marks in 2023 and 2025, but 9 in 2024 and only 6 in 2026, so any page quoting a narrow range for it is quoting one year. Solid State Physics has been falling, 12, 12, 8 and then 6 marks, and the 2027 syllabus has cut several of its topics. And Classical Mechanics and Electromagnetic Theory have grown together, from 12 marks combined in 2023 to 26 in 2026.

GATE does not fix how many questions of each type a paper has, and PH shows it. In 2023, 55 of the 85 Physics marks were MCQs, the only type with negative marking. In 2024 it was 33. MSQ marks went from 33 to 13 to 32 to 30 to 18. So do not prepare for a fixed pattern; prepare to switch between the three.

NAT has been between 17 and 26 marks, 20% to 31% of the Physics part. It is not a steady “nearly 30%”; that was true only of 2026. What is steady is that NAT and MSQ together carried 30 to 54 marks with no negative marking at all, so an attempt on those cannot cost marks (a wrong answer simply scores zero). The negative-marking risk sits on the MCQs, 31 to 55 marks a paper.

An MSQ (multiple select question) can have one or more correct options. Many students assume “at least two”. The official keys show otherwise: in four of the last five papers, at least one MSQ had exactly one correct option. There is no partial credit, so marking a second option on such a question scores zero for it (no negative mark, but nothing gained).

Keys also record questions where every candidate was given the marks (“marks to all”), usually because the question was flawed. PH 2023 had four in the Physics part, Q11, Q15, Q41 and Q59, worth 6 marks together. 2024 and 2022 had such items only in General Aptitude, and 2025 and 2026 had none. These do not change how you prepare, but they explain why an answer key can look odd when you check your own attempt.

Section totals tell you where to spend hours; the repeat list tells you what to practise first inside each section. These are topics asked in at least two of the four papers, by our tagging. Two of them, residues in Mathematical Physics and logic circuits in Electronics, were asked every single year.

Notice what is not on it. Two questions of the 2026 paper were on topics that the 2027 syllabus has removed (Q32 on tight binding, Q54 on band-gap transitions), and a third, Q50 on self-adjoint differential operators, sits in the special-functions block that went, though operators in Hilbert space remain under Quantum Mechanics. None of those topics repeated across years. Nothing on the repeat list is affected by the 2027 cuts: all 20 rows are still in the syllabus. That makes this list a safe place to start, whatever the 2027 paper does with the two new sections.

The most recent paper is the best guide to the current setters’ style. By our count it had 27 MCQs (41 marks), 11 MSQs (18 marks) and 17 NATs (26 marks) in the Physics part. Quantum Mechanics had 9 questions for 15 marks, Electromagnetic Theory and Classical Mechanics 13 marks each, Thermodynamics 11, Mathematical Physics 10, and Nuclear, Solid State and Electronics 6 each. It also had the lowest scores of the four on the official numbers: the mean mark of all who appeared fell to 14.68, and nobody scored more than 70. Our marks-vs-rank guide shows what that did to the score.

Everything above can be checked against the originals. The GATE 2027 download page lists PH papers going back to 2007; these are the five most recent, with their final keys. Use them as full mocks in the last six weeks, not as reading material in the first six.