Home › Blog › The Seven Question Shapes in a General Academic Module Set

How to solve it

The Seven Question Shapes in a General Academic Module Set

By Moksh Khatri · Founder, DMAT Club · Updated 20 August 2026

Exam facts verified 11 September 2026 against g.a.s.t. (d-mat.de) and APS India (aps-india.de). Answer formats checked against the official dMAT demo exam, sat 23 August 2026. The dMAT is a first-year exam and its rules move — confirm anything date-sensitive at the official source before you act on it.

---

The General Academic Module looks like one task repeated: read a passage, answer single-choice questions about it. Sat that way it is a slog, because you re-read the passage for every question as though each one needed the same thing from it.

They do not. Across our own General Academic Module bank, the questions fall into seven recognisable shapes, and the shape tells you where the answer lives and roughly how long it should take. Recognising which one you are looking at, in the first few seconds, is the single most useful habit in this module.

First: the two families

Before the seven shapes there is a split that matters more, because it decides whether a passage is even relevant.

Applied questions are the ones people misread most often, because they scan upwards for a passage that is not there. If there is no passage, stop looking for one: everything needed is in the question. In our bank the applied questions cluster in mathematics, natural sciences, economics and social sciences.

The seven shapes

1. Locate

The answer is stated in the passage, in words close to the ones the question uses. "According to the passage, what do the two columns of a matrix represent?" No reasoning is required beyond finding the sentence.

Treat these as free marks and take them first. If a locate question is taking more than about forty seconds, you are reading the whole passage again instead of scanning for the term.

2. Apply

The passage gives a rule or formula; the question hands you numbers and asks you to run it once. "What is the determinant of M = [[6, 2], [4, 3]]?" after a passage that defined the determinant as ad − bc.

Quick, provided you resist re-deriving the formula. Find it, use it, move on. Remember there is no calculator and no paper, so the arithmetic is always designed to be doable in your head — if it looks ugly, you have the wrong formula or the wrong numbers.

3. Derive

One step further out: the passage gives a rule, and you must work out something the passage never states directly. "A unit square is transformed by M. What is the area of the resulting parallelogram?" — which needs the determinant and the fact that its magnitude is the area factor.

These are the honest middle of the module. Budget real time for them.

4. Sensitivity

A parameter changes and you are asked what happens to the result. "Both entries in the first column are doubled. What happens to the area factor?"

The trap is computing both cases. You almost never need to. Look at how the quantity is built and reason about the direction and size of the change, which is usually one step. Answer options in sensitivity questions tend to be "doubles / halves / unchanged / quadruples" rather than numbers, which is the tell.

5. Transfer

Two parts of the passage have to be combined, or a rule from one context is applied in another. "A shear [[1, 7], [0, 1]] is applied to a triangle of area 12. What is the image's area?" — the shear was defined in one paragraph and the area factor in a different one.

These are the ones worth flagging and coming back to, because they need two things held at once and that is expensive when you are tired.

6. Universal

Not about the specific case at all: "Which statement is true in every case where the determinant is zero?" The words "every", "always", "must" and "in all cases" are the marker.

These reward eliminating rather than solving. A single counter-example kills an option, and finding one counter-example is usually far quicker than proving the survivor is right.

7. Figure and table

The answer is in a chart or a table rather than in the prose. "Using Table 1, roughly how many times greater is the thermal resistance of the mineral wool layer?"

Note the word "roughly". Figure questions are usually built so an estimate separates the options cleanly. Read the axis labels and the units before the numbers — the commonest error here is not arithmetic, it is answering in the wrong unit.

What this changes about how you sit the module

1. Read the passage once, properly, then stop. The reading cost is fixed and you pay it once. What you are building is a map of where things are, not a memory of the content.
2. Sweep the locate and apply questions first within a set. They are the cheapest marks and they warm up your sense of where the passage keeps things.
3. Flag transfer and universal, do not fight them. Two expensive questions can eat the time that four cheap ones would have paid for.
4. Never leave a blank. There is no negative marking anywhere in the dMAT, so an unanswered question is the only answer that cannot score. See strategic guessing.

Where the domains come from

Passages are drawn from across the academic spectrum rather than from your degree — mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, economics, business administration, computational sciences, engineering and humanities. That is the point of the module, and it is why revising your branch fundamentals is not the preparation: every Indian APS candidate sits this same module whatever their bachelor's was in.

For what the module is and where it sits in the exam, start with the General Academic Module explained. For the reading technique that makes 90 minutes workable, see reading a GAM passage under time.

Frequently asked questions