What GATE scores from 2023 to 2025 reveal (Express photo by Sumit Malhotra/ representative)The Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) scores and raw marks show sharp extremes in candidates’ performances across disciplines. In 2025, Computer Science and Information Technology (CS) achieved a perfect maximum of 100, corresponding to a GATE score of 1000, while Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DA) reached 96.33, also scoring 1000. Conversely, some disciplines, such as Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (NM), had maximum marks as low as 52.33, and several papers, including CS, had minimum marks below 18. This article explores the patterns behind GATE’s maximum and minimum marks and scores obtained by candidates from 2023 to 2025. By examining the extremes rather than average performance, we gain insight into which disciplines are highly competitive, how exam normalisation affects scoring, and where aspirants struggle the most. The analysis spans traditional engineering fields, emerging areas like Data Science, and even Humanities and Social Sciences, revealing how GATE’s structure shapes performance trends over time.Read More | GATE 2026 Results: List of top 20 engineering collegesOne striking pattern is the dominance of computing and data-related disciplines. Across the three years, CS and DA consistently topped maximum scores, often hitting or approaching 100. In contrast, disciplines such as Naval Architecture (NM) or Mathematics (MA) experienced lower maximum marks, reflecting either more challenging exam papers or a smaller pool of highly prepared candidates.Normalisation plays a key role in GATE scoring. Despite differences in maximum raw marks – for example, Civil Engineering (CE) had a maximum mark of 89.02 in 2025, while Mechanical Engineering (ME) peaked at 95.33 – top candidates in nearly every discipline scored 1000. This shows that GATE adjusts for paper difficulty across multiple sessions, ensuring that the highest-performing candidates are “rewarded relative to their peers, rather than on absolute raw marks alone.”Minimum marks tell a complementary story. Negative marks were common due to GATE’s penalty for incorrect answers, with extreme lows like –16.39 in CE or –18.08 in CS in 2025.Some Humanities and Social Sciences papers exhibited even wider spreads: for instance, Linguistics (XH-C3) recorded a minimum score of –1300 in 2024, indicating that normalisation can create extremely low-end values in smaller candidate pools. Year-to-year trends reveal shifts in exam difficulty and competitiveness. Mechanical Engineering saw its maximum marks rise from 63.33 in 2023 to 95.33 in 2025, while Mathematics dropped from 90.67 in 2023 to 57 in 2025. Similarly, subjects like Environmental Science and Engineering (ES) and Metallurgical Engineering (MT) displayed fluctuations in both maximum and minimum scores.Story continues below this adRead More | GATE 2026: Computer Science draws record numbers between 2023 and 2025, trends over the yearsHumanities and Social Sciences papers showed some of the widest variations in minimum scores, reflecting smaller candidate numbers and higher score volatility. For example, Philosophy (XH-C4) had a minimum score of –1108 in 2024, while the top score remained normalised to 1000. Mridusmita Deka covers education and has worked with the Careers360 previously. She is an alumnus of Gauhati University and Dibrugarh University. ... Read More © IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd