the total qualifiers in gate 2021 dipped to 178 as compared to last years 188 despite flexibility in norms to begin with all test papers of gate 2021 were entirely objective type including a few multiple choice questions mcq multiple select questions msq andor numerical answer type nat questions while one or two subject papers were allowed the two paper combinations could be chosen from the given list of combinationsin a first two new subject papers were introduced es environmental science and engineering and xh humanities and social sciences in economicsenglishlinguisticsphilosophy psychologysociology taking the total number of subject papers to 27 also for the first time thirdyear students were eligible to appear for the exam in which around 10000 qualified out of the close to 1 lakh applicantsdeepankar choudhury gate 2021 organising chairperson and institute chair professor iitbombay says the flexibility in norms which permits a greater number of aspirants to appear for the exam does not translate into more examready and highquality candidates an increase in the total number of aspirants does not necessarily increase the percentage of qualifiersthirdyear qualifiers are at an advantagechoudhury explains that those thirdyear students who qualified gate 2021 can use their score next year on completion of their ug degrees since the validity of their score is for 3 years in this case till march 2024 it can either be a practice test enabling them to better their score next year or they can use this score as qualifying marks for gaining admission to heis going by the percentage of qualifiers around 106 from the third year qualified the exam if the thirdyear component is excluded the percentage of nonthird year candidates qualifying the exam has increased in which case the percentage of qualifiers in 2021 would have gone up to over 20it may be noted that around 711542 candidates had appeared for gate 2021 out of which 126813 candidates qualified for the exam when compared to 2020 a total of 858890 candidates registered for the gate 2020 exam wherein 685088 candidates appeared for the exam out of which 188 candidates were declared qualifieddifficulty vs performancehumanities candidates says choudhury who were attempting the exam for the first time fared better than many other qualifiers with 2335 qualifying from xhc6 sociology the highest in the stream followed by xhc5 psychology where the percentage of qualifying candidates was 2138 while xhc3 linguistics had relatively lesser qualifiers at 20number of qualifiers varies in each subject with st statistics registering the lowest percentage of qualifiers at 842 this signifies that it had the toughest paper among all the subjects as compared to gg geophysics which had the highest percentage of qualified candidates at 2954 es environmental science and engineering had a fairly good percentage of qualifying candidates at 2082 due to a moderately difficult paper choudhury sayslast year in gate 2020 percentage of qualifiers in bm biomedical engineering paper was lowest at 325 followed by ma math paper at 526 the percentage of qualifiers in