Two friends, Ram and Shyam, are out on a safari in Kenya. En-route they see a vast stretch of land covered with velvette-ish green layer of grass. They get out of their car, relax, put off their shoes and start walking bare footed. Suddenly they see a tiger running towards them. Ram starts running whereas Shyam starts putting on the shoes. Puzzled, Ram asks Shyam, "Do you think you can outrun the tiger just by have the shoes on?" Shyam replies back, "I don't need to outrun the tiger. I just need to outrun YOU!"

India has a huge intellectual capital. With so many intelligent brains competing with each other, percentile/comparative evaluation is the most logical solution for admission to IISc and the IITs, which in turn have a limited number of seats. With this kind of comparative evaluation, the institutions are able to simply take the best of the lot and leave the rest. You should be aware that only 4 out of a thousand students giving GATE get a chance to be interviewed by IITs and the IISc. The numbers getting admission to these institutions are even lesser. So being good is not enough. You should be one of the better ones amongst the best.

The sole purpose of GATE is not only to conduct a test for admission but, which is also the major goal, to identify the suitable engineers/researchers in various areas and make them to choose their area of choice in which they can pursue their master degree. As you must be knowing by now, GATE is only organized by IITs and IISc which always try to innovate and introduce new systems to test the basic knowledge of candidates in various fields.

As a part of that innovation, the previous year GATE papers were fully objective type. Although this made the job relatively easier for the evaluators, the candidates now have a bound choice to cover all the topics. Being set by the highly qualified faculty, the questions papers are not like a very traditional one. They always try to test the very basic of candidates in respective areas by bringing the element of innovation in these papers. It is not surprising that sometimes the questions are mere applications of basic concepts in their area of research.