Whether GPAT is an online or offline exam?

Graduate Pharmacy Aptitude Test (GPAT), is an all INDIA level entrance exam conducted by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) every year. The examination was intended to provide all India level rank which can be used for admission into the post graduate courses in various universities and colleges across the country. GPAT score is also useful for getting admission in to integrated Ph.D. courses and other special courses offered by few universities. Qualifying in the GPAT is an essential one to get eligibility to write NIPER-JEE exam.

GATE  to GPAT

Previously the exam was conducted along with the engineering stream under the name of GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) as an all India level exam. Later on, a special examination board was constituted under the name GPAT exclusively for pharmacy stream organized by AICTE.

Who are eligible ?

Aspirants who have completed B.pharm course or students studying the final year of B.pharm are eligible to write the GPAT exam. Students studying III B.pharm are not eligible as the rank of the GPAT is valid for one year only.

Examination pattern

Initially GPAT was conducted as offline exam but from last few years GPAT is conducted as online exam. The exam pattern includes 125 multiple choice questions (MCQ) each carrying four marks for correct answer. So total marks of the exam is 4 x 125=500. Negative marking is there in GPAT which is more important factor influencing the net score and qualifying marks in GPAT. For each wrong answer, one mark is deducted from the total score.

The total duration of GPAT is 180 minutes i.e. 3 hours. Exam is conducted in a single session at various centers declared by AICTE. So each question will have at an average of 86.4 sec time to attempt.

Exam interface

GPAT exam interface is user friendly and you can easily utilize the panel to attempt all questions. A single question will be displayed each time with four options to choose. User can choose any option which he/she may think most suitable answer for the question. User can modify the opted answer anytime during the exam period. Below is a online GPAT test model developed by medisyn.

User can also deselect the answer if he/she doesn’t want to attempt the question.

Flag and Unflag

Since GPAT is an online exam user can’t remember easily the questions which he/she decided to attempt later. In order to facilitate this, GPAT exam panel will show two options FLAG and UNFLAG.

If user wants to review the question later, he/she can put flag option on the question. So after viewing all the questions, if still time remains, user can review the flagged questions once again to either confirm or change the answer. Flagged questions doesn’t effect the marks and they simply indicate that question may be reviewed later.  So a question can be flagged either answered or unanswered.

If a flagged question is not answered, user will not get any positive  or negative marks as the question was not answered. On the other hand, if question was answered and flagged, user may get either positive or negative marks based on the correctness of the answer. So flagging a question is not related with marks awarded.