Every question from the NDA papers, broken down to sub-topic level and weighted towards what the recent sittings are actually doing rather than what the syllabus says. The GAT carries twice the marks of Mathematics, and half of its General Knowledge section is school science. Read the cut lines, then build the timetable.
Two papers, both compulsory, 900 marks between them. The General Ability Test is a single 2½-hour sitting that contains English and General Knowledge back to back — they are separated below because their contents have nothing in common, but you write them as one paper against one clock.
Frequency tables average away the two most useful things here: the blocks that never move, and the question formats that arrived, ran for two sittings and disappeared. Practising a dead format is the most expensive mistake available to you.
Physics, Chemistry and Biology account for 496 of the 1,000 General Knowledge questions and 49.5 a paper on current form — 198 marks of school-level science before you open a newspaper.
Physics alone runs 26, 25, 24, 24, 21, 25, 25, 27, 25, 25. It has never dropped below 21 in ten sittings. At 100 marks a paper it is worth more than any single topic in Mathematics, and it does not go stale between attempts.
Algebra runs at 33.7 questions a sitting and has never fallen below 27 in eighteen papers — 84 marks, more than the whole of Trigonometry and Probability combined.
It is not one topic but seven finishable ones: sets and relations, functions, sequences and series, quadratics and polynomials, permutations and combinations, complex numbers, binomial theorem. Each is worth 3–5 questions a paper and each appears in nearly every sitting.
The most dependable thing in the paper is synonyms, and it has still missed a sitting. Comprehension passages went to zero in 2026-I after five straight appearances. Ordering of jumbled sentence parts ran at 10 a paper through 2023-I and was zero in 2026-I.
Compare Mathematics, where sixteen sub-topics have appeared in all eighteen sittings. Every hour you spend on an English format is a bet; every hour on Mathematics or science is not.
Cloze passages appeared at 10 a paper in both 2024 sittings and have not been seen since. Discourse markers did exactly the same in 2025 — 10, 10, then zero. S1–S6 sentence ordering ran at 5 in both 2025 papers and nowhere else. Word pairs and confusables appeared in 2023-II and 2025, never twice running in the same shape.
That is a paper being reshuffled, not a syllabus changing. Recognise each format so it cannot cost you time on the day, but do not build a study block around any of them.
Synonyms, antonyms and idioms ran at 10, 10, 10 in 2022-I, were cut to 5, 5, 5 across 2024, fell to 5, 0, 0 in 2025-I, and returned in 2026-I at 10, 10, 6.
That is 26 of 50 questions — 104 marks — from a word list. Nothing else in this exam converts rote memory into marks at that rate. A daily list is the single highest-return English habit available to you.
Probability has gone from 9.3 a paper before 2024-II to 12.5 across the last four. Statistics has moved the other way over the same window, from 9.4 to 6.3.
The pair together is flat at about 19 questions, so this is a reallocation, not growth. Correlation and regression is where it is coming from: 3, 2, 3, 3, 4 in the older papers, 0, 0, 1 across the last three sittings.
Differential equations ran at 3–5 a paper through 2021 and reads 0, 1, 2 across the last three sittings — 3.7 a paper before 2024-II against 1.25 since. Maxima and minima has slid the same way, from 3.6 to 2.0.
Neither is gone, and both are cheap to hold once learnt. But if you are choosing what to drill in the last month, they are no longer where the marks are.
Economics has produced 13 questions in ten sittings and defence 14 — about one each per paper. Polity averaged 3.5 and then jumped to 8 in 2026-I, its highest reading in the record.
One spike is not a trend. Know the Constitution's basic structure and the current office-holders; do not read a constitutional commentary for four marks a paper.
Tick a row when you have finished it — the bar tracks the share of expected marks you have covered, and it is remembered on this device. Every sub-topic is ranked by expected questions in your next paper — a blend weighted 60% to the last four sittings and 40% to the full record, so recent shifts move the ranking without one odd paper dominating it. The brass rule is the cut line: everything above it accounts for 80% of the marks.
Change in questions per paper, last four sittings against everything before them. Positive means the recent papers want more of it than the older papers did.
Topic weights sitting by sitting. Darker means more questions. Read across a row to see whether a topic is dependable or bursty — a row that alternates between 0 and 10 is telling you not to bet a week of study on it.
Built from the ladder above, in the order that converts hours into marks fastest. General Knowledge leads, and this is the opposite of the advice most aspirants are given. A GAT question is worth 4 marks against 2.5 in Mathematics; General Knowledge alone is 400 marks against Mathematics's 300; and half of General Knowledge is fixed school science that stays learnt. Mathematics is second because it is the most predictable paper, not because it pays best.
A wrong answer costs a third of the question's marks — 0.83 in Mathematics, 1.33 in the GAT — so an attempt only pays if you are right more than 25% of the time. Set your realistic attempt count and strike rate for each paper — they are rarely the same — and see what the sitting is actually worth.
Every sub-topic in the ladder links through to real questions from these papers on SquadPrep, where you can drill them topic by topic with answers and explanations.
Source. The NDA question papers themselves. Mathematics covers eighteen sittings, 2016-II to 2026-I. The General Ability Test covers ten, 2017-I and 2022-I to 2026-I. Per-paper averages are computed against each paper's own sitting count, never a common denominator.
Expected questions per paper = 0.6 × the last-four-sitting average + 0.4 × the all-sitting average. The recency weight is set to let a genuine format change surface within two sittings while stopping a single unusual paper from rewriting the ranking.
Trend = last-four-sitting average minus the average of everything before it.
Reliability = the share of sittings in which the sub-topic appeared at all. High expected value with low reliability means a bursty topic — know it, but do not build a week around it.
Marks. Mathematics questions are worth 2.5 and the General Ability Test 4, with a third of the question's own marks deducted for a wrong answer. Every marks figure in this file is computed from those weights, not from question counts.