The syllabus does not change. The paper does not get harder. What changes is that the exam becomes a piece of software you have never used, sat under a clock you cannot see the end of — and that is worth preparing for separately.
How current this page is. The NTA Information Bulletin for NEET (UG) 2027 has not been published yet; it is expected between November 2026 and January 2027, and it is the document that settles the format. Everything below reflects the 2026 bulletin plus the public announcement that NEET (UG) is moving to computer based testing. We will update this page when the 2027 bulletin is out. If you are reading a NEET page that does not tell you which bulletin it is quoting, be careful with it.
These figures are from the NTA Information Bulletin for NEET (UG) 2026, chapter 4 ("Pattern of the Test", "Duration of Test", and "Important Points to Note").
| Questions | 180, all compulsory |
|---|---|
| Duration | 180 minutes — exactly one minute per question |
| Subjects | Physics 45, Chemistry 45, Biology 90 (Botany + Zoology) |
| Correct answer | +4 |
| Incorrect answer | −1 |
| Unanswered | 0 |
| Maximum marks | 720 |
Source: National Testing Agency, NEET (UG) — the Information Bulletin is published there each cycle.
The minute-per-question rate is the number worth internalising. It is not a target for every question — you will spend twenty seconds on some and four minutes on others — but it is the budget, and any mock that gives you longer is teaching you a pace you cannot use.
If you have only sat NEET on paper, the change is bigger than "the questions are on a screen". The NTA client has a specific shape, and every minute you spend learning it on exam day is a minute you did not spend on the paper.
A grid down the right-hand side, one cell per question, colour-coded into five states: not visited, not answered, answered, marked for review, and answered and marked for review. That last one matters more than it sounds — an answered-and-marked question is counted for evaluation, which candidates regularly get wrong and leave marks on the table over.
Every question is left with one of: Save & Next, Save & Mark for Review, Clear Response, or Mark for Review & Next. Two of them save your answer and two of them do not, and the difference is not obvious under time pressure.
Subjects sit behind tabs at the top and you can move between them freely. The countdown is set at the server, not on your machine, and it does not stop for anything. When it reaches zero the paper submits itself.
A computer based NEET at this scale cannot seat every candidate at once, so it runs in shifts across several days. Candidates in different shifts sit different papers, and no two papers are exactly equal in difficulty. Normalisation is how that is handled.
The mechanism, in plain terms: your raw marks are converted into a percentile within your own shift — what fraction of candidates in that shift you beat — and those percentiles are then mapped onto a common scale. Score 600 in a brutal shift and 600 in a gentle one, and the harder shift's 600 is worth more, because it sits higher within its own group.
Two practical consequences. First, you are competing against the candidates in your shift, not against a number you saw on a coaching poster — so a "safe score" quoted for a past paper-based year does not transfer cleanly. Second, there is nothing to game: you cannot pick a shift, and a shift being hard is not a disadvantage once normalisation has run.
Everything you already do for the syllabus still applies. What is new is narrow:
Sit a free full-length CBT paper
180 questions, 180 minutes, on an interface built to match the exam client. Every question read against the page it was printed on.