At first the syllabus of NTSE:
NCERT has not prescribed any particular syllabus for the State Level Examination as well as for National Level Examination. The reason is simple: India has no universal school board: there are too many educational boards – at National Level as well as State Level.
However, it is safe to assume that questions asked at National Level would be more or less NCERT book oriented and since the very purpose of State Level Examination is to ultimately select students at national level, the questions asked at State Level would also be more or less NCERT book oriented. The standard of questions conforms to the level of Classes VII and VIII.
Do not worry at all about the syllabus – questions asked are more or less common to all boards, so that good students from every board can answer. You can find what kind of question comes from this NTSE sample paper by NCERT.
Click here to download the NTSE sample paper.
This NTSE sample paper gives you 15 questions on Mental Ability Test and also for Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) it gives you 39 questions (15 questions on Social Sciences, 15 questions on Science and 9 questions on Mathematics). From these questions, you can find the question pattern/standard of NTSE exam.
Question Pattern of NTSE:
Question Pattern of both State Level Examination & National Level Examination are similar and there are two parts of the exam, with a short interval in between them:
Part-I: Mental Ability Test (MAT).
Part-II: Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
In MAT questions on analogies, classification, series, pattern perception, hidden figures, coding-decoding, block assembly, problem solving etc. is asked. MAT of NTSE is conducted to judge your power of reasoning, ability to think, ability to judge, evaluate or discriminate, ability to visualize in the space, spatial orientation.
There are 100 multiple-choice type questions, with four alternatives, out of which you need to choose the correct answer. Each question carries one mark. There is no negative marking.
In SAT questions are asked based on specific subjects of Science, Mathematics & Social Sciences. SAT of NTSE is conducted to judge how much of text-book knowledge your have earned.
The Scholastic Aptitude Test consists of 100 multiple choice questions of one mark each. Each question has four alternatives, out of which you need to choose the correct answer. There are 35 questions from Science, 35 from Social Sciences 20 from Mathematics and 10 from mixed subjects. There is no negative marking.
Minimum qualifying marks in the State Level Examination of NTSE is 40% mark for general category candidate and 32% for SC/ST/physically challenged candidates.
The marks earned by you in the State Level Examination is for screening purpose only and is not carried forward to the National Level Examination for the Merit List. Scoring above minimum qualifying marks does not guarantees you for the next stage (i.e. to be recommended for National Level Exam). Your rank should be within the state-quota alloted to it by NCERT. This state quota is alloted by NCERT based All India Educational Survey (AIES) data.
In the National Level Examination of NTSE, following table gives you how many questions are asked in each section, time and what is the minimum qualifying mark you should score:
I hope above information on NTSE Exam Syllabus and Exam Pattern helps you to know about the exam better. You can find more study materials for NTSE exam in following two blog post:
Useful information, but most of it is already available on the NCERT website. Many students (and parents as well) are keen to know as to where they can access the previous years (atleast last 2 years) question papers (preferably solved). Secondly are there any online resources available for enabling the students to prepare and practice for the exam. Do let us know through your blog the answers to the above two queries