NDA Exam Pattern: Maths and GAT Marks, Negative Marking, the 25% Rule

The NDA written exam is two papers on one day — Mathematics (120 questions, 300 marks) and the General Ability Test (150 questions, 600 marks) — each lasting 2½ hours, with a third of a question’s marks lost for every wrong answer. The written total of 900 is later added to an SSB score out of 900 for a merit total of 1,800. This guide explains the pattern from the notification, the real cost of a wrong answer, the official weights inside GAT, and the per-subject minimum that many sites wrongly call a fixed 25%.

Notification (II) 2026; our arithmetic from “all items carry equal marks”.

The papers are offline OMR sheets marked with a black ball-point pen. No calculator, mathematical tables or log tables are allowed, and no scribe. Mathematics and Part B of GAT (General Knowledge) are set in both Hindi and English; Part A (English) is, naturally, in English only. The penalty rule reads: “one third (0.33) of the marks assigned to that question will be deducted as penalty”; marking more than one answer counts as wrong, and a blank costs nothing.

The official weights are the best guide to where GAT’s 400 General Knowledge marks come from: about a quarter from physics, a fifth each from history and geography, and the rest from chemistry, general science and current events. English carries 200 marks on its own — a third of GAT, and nearly a quarter of the whole written exam — which many candidates under-prepare.

The Maths paper covers eight heads: algebra; matrices and determinants; trigonometry; analytical geometry of two and three dimensions; differential calculus; integral calculus and differential equations; vector algebra; and statistics and probability. With 120 questions in 150 minutes, the average is 75 seconds a question, and there is no calculator — speed at arithmetic and standard results matters as much as method.

A blind guess on a four-option question is worth exactly nothing on average — but its spread is wide, so a string of guesses usually loses marks. Once you can rule out one option, the average turns positive. The practical rule is to attempt a question when you can eliminate at least one answer, and to leave pure guesses blank.

The Maths paper is the tighter of the two: 75 seconds for a question that may need several lines of calculation without a calculator. The usual approach is two passes — answer everything you can solve quickly, mark the long ones, and return to them with the time left. In GAT, English and most General Knowledge questions are recall or short reasoning, so the time pressure is lower; the risk there is careless guessing, which the one-third penalty punishes. Plan the sitting so that you finish each paper with ten minutes to re-check the OMR sheet: a mis-shaded bubble is marked as whatever it shows.

The written cut-offs for the SSB have ranged from 291 to 334 out of 900 for mixed lists in 2023–2025, and 358.84 for women in (II) 2025. The median written score of candidates finally recommended was 351–389 in the cycles with published marks (our calculation from UPSC’s marks PDFs). In paper terms, a candidate who scores about 100 in Maths and about 260 in GAT is around 360 — above every recent mixed cut-off and in line with the median recommended candidate. Our cut-offs guide has the full six-cycle table, and the calculator above turns right and wrong answers into a written score.

The rule exists, but it is a decision UPSC takes each cycle and publishes only with the final cut-off. The three most recent cycles used 25%, which means at least 75 of 300 in Maths and 150 of 600 in GAT. That is the sensible bar to plan for. It matters most for candidates strong in one paper: a GAT score good enough to clear the total cut-off does not help if the Maths score is under the per-subject line.