GATE CSE 2027 Syllabus PDF: Every Topic, Section by Section

The official GATE CSE 2027 syllabus is a two-page PDF published by IIT Madras at gate2027.iitm.ac.in, under Test Papers and Syllabus. It has ten technical sections plus General Aptitude, which has its own PDF on the same page. This guide lists every section in the official order and puts next to each one the marks it has actually carried in recent papers, so you can see the syllabus and its weight in one place.

Key takeaways

• The file: CS_GATE2027_Syllabus.pdf on gate2027.iitm.ac.in. General Aptitude is GA_GATE2027_Syllabus.pdf.
• Ten technical sections plus General Aptitude. The paper is 65 questions for 100 marks in 3 hours.
• Marks split: General Aptitude 15, Engineering Mathematics about 13, core CS subjects about 72.
• The syllabus was revised for 2027, but only Digital Logic, COA and Computer Networks changed wording.
• The syllabus lists topics, not depth. Depth comes from past papers, which is why weightage matters as much as the list.
• Download the PDF yourself and use it as a tick-list. Do not prepare from a coaching handout that may predate the revision.

Where the official PDF is

Go to gate2027.iitm.ac.in, open Test Papers and Syllabus, and pick CS. The direct file is CS_GATE2027_Syllabus.pdf. General Aptitude is a separate download on the same page and applies to all 30 GATE 2027 papers.

Two cautions. First, syllabus documents can be updated; check the official page again closer to February. Second, GATE CSE Guide is an independent site and not connected to IIT Madras or the GATE office, so the official PDF is the last word on every line below.

Section weight at a glance

Average marks per paper, 2018–2026, compiled from published paper analyses. Sources differ by two or three marks in some years because borderline questions are classified differently, so read these as bands, not as exact figures.

Low weight is not low importance. Digital Logic and Compiler Design are the most formula-stable subjects in the paper and give the best marks per hour of study. Year-by-year numbers are in GATE CSE subject-wise weightage.

Section 1: Engineering Mathematics

Four named blocks, unchanged since 2021.

• Discrete Mathematics: propositional and first order logic; sets, relations, functions, partial orders and lattices; monoids and groups; graphs — connectivity, matching, colouring; combinatorics — counting, recurrence relations, generating functions.
• Linear Algebra: matrices, determinants, systems of linear equations, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, LU decomposition.
• Calculus: limits, continuity and differentiability, maxima and minima, mean value theorem, integration.
• Probability and Statistics: random variables; uniform, normal, exponential, Poisson and binomial distributions; mean, median, mode and standard deviation; conditional probability and Bayes theorem.

Discrete Mathematics carries most of the block's marks in recent papers. Topic-level detail is in discrete mathematics for GATE CSE.

Section 2: Digital Logic

Boolean algebra and minimization — algebraic technique, Karnaugh map, tabular method. Design of combinational and sequential circuits. Number representation and arithmetic, fixed and floating point.

The 2027 wording newly names the three minimization methods. The tabular method is Quine–McCluskey, which is now unambiguously examinable even though it has almost no past-paper record.

Section 3: Computer Organization and Architecture

Instruction set and addressing modes. Design of the arithmetic and logic unit. Design of the control unit — hardwired and microprogrammed. Memory interfacing and hierarchy: performance, cache memory mapping. I/O interface, interrupt and DMA. Instruction pipelining and pipeline hazards.

This section changed most in wording after Computer Networks. "Main memory and secondary storage" is gone, so disk geometry is now low priority, while control unit design, memory interfacing and memory performance are explicit for the first time.

Section 4: Programming and Data Structures

Programming in C. Recursion. Arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, binary search trees, binary heaps, graphs.

C is the only language named. Binary search trees and binary heaps are the only two structures singled out beyond the generic list, and both are asked almost every year.

Section 5: Algorithms

Searching, sorting, hashing. Asymptotic worst case time and space complexity. Algorithm design techniques: greedy, dynamic programming and divide-and-conquer. Graph traversals, minimum spanning trees, shortest paths.

Note what is absent: P, NP and NP-completeness are not named. That is not a 2027 change; the wording matches 2026.

Section 6: Theory of Computation

Regular expressions and finite automata. Context-free grammars and push-down automata. Regular and context-free languages, pumping lemma. Turing machines and undecidability.

Four clauses, and every one of them has produced questions in nearly every paper since 2004.

Section 7: Compiler Design

Lexical analysis, parsing, syntax-directed translation. Runtime environments. Intermediate code generation. Local optimisation, and data flow analyses: constant propagation, liveness analysis, common sub expression elimination.

The data-flow clause was added in 2021 and has appeared in nearly every paper since.

Section 8: Operating System

System calls, processes, threads, inter-process communication, concurrency and synchronization. Deadlock. CPU and I/O scheduling. Memory management and virtual memory. File systems.

"CPU and I/O scheduling" is where disk scheduling now lives, which is worth knowing given the COA change above.

Section 9: Databases

ER-model. Relational model: relational algebra, tuple calculus, SQL. Integrity constraints, normal forms. File organization, indexing — for example B and B+ trees. Transactions and concurrency control.

B and B+ trees are the only example the CS syllabus names anywhere, which is a strong hint about what gets asked.

Section 10: Computer Networks

Principles of layering. Basics of switching — circuit, packet and virtual circuit — and performance metrics. Data link layer: error detection, medium access control, Ethernet. Distance vector and link state routing. IPv4: fragmentation, CIDR notation, network address translation. TCP: flow control and congestion control, socket API. DNS and HTTP.

This section lost the most in 2027. The OSI and TCP/IP stack enumeration, framing, Ethernet bridging, shortest-path and flooding routing, ARP, DHCP, ICMP, UDP, SMTP, FTP and email are no longer named. Performance metrics and socket API are new. Retained topics therefore carry the full Computer Networks weight.

General Aptitude

Common to every GATE paper and worth a fixed 15 marks: Verbal Aptitude, Quantitative Aptitude, Analytical Aptitude and Spatial Aptitude. Unchanged since the 2021 restructuring.

How to use the PDF

1. Print it and tick clauses, not chapters. The syllabus is written in clauses. "Design of control unit – hardwired and microprogrammed" is one tick; do not mark COA done because you finished cache.
2. Put weight next to each section from the table above, and let that decide the order in which you close gaps.
3. Check the items that are newly named but rarely asked. Tabular minimization, control unit design, memory interfacing, switching performance metrics and the socket API are in the syllabus and thin in the archive. That combination is exactly what the 2027 syllabus changes guide exists to flag.
4. Filter old papers by what was removed. Out-of-syllabus topics in old GATE CSE papers lists the 2016, 2021 and 2027 removals by year.
5. Read the pattern alongside the syllabus. Question types and negative marking are in the GATE CSE 2027 exam pattern.

The syllabus tells you what can be asked; it does not tell you how deep. The book expands each of these clauses to subtopic and concept level across 27 years of papers, marking which items are new, retained or dropped, and ranks what to study first. See what the full book covers.