Engineering College Admission Test
ECAT: format, paper pattern and marking
ECAT gives you one minute per question and four marks for each correct answer. The marking rule changed recently, and it changes how you should approach the paper.
Looking for this year's dates?
We deliberately don't publish test dates or registration deadlines — they change every cycle, and a stale date on a page like this does real damage. Check UET Lahore directly. Everything below is structural and holds across cycles.
At a glance
- Conducted by
- UET Lahore
- Questions
- 100 MCQs
- Duration
- 100 minutes
- Total marks
- 400 (4 marks per correct answer)
- Mode
- Paper-based
- Negative marking
- None for Fall 2026 — earlier sittings deducted 1 mark per wrong answer
What's in the paper
Section weights decide where your preparation time is worth spending.
Eligibility
- •FSc Pre-Engineering or an equivalent qualification.
- •The Chemistry section is replaced by Computer Science or Statistics depending on your intermediate group.
Qualifying marks
There is no separate pass mark — your ECAT score feeds the merit aggregate, where it carries 33% under UET Lahore’s current weighting.
Worth knowing
UET announced no negative marking for Fall 2026, reversing the earlier 1-mark deduction. Past papers and older guides still assume the deduction, and preparing under the wrong assumption changes whether guessing is worth it — under the current rule, it always is.
Format details checked on against ECAT pattern as reported by Maqsad. These are secondary sources — confirm against UET Lahore before you rely on them.