Career Help & Jobs in IndiaInformation on careers & higher education in India

XAT 2007 Analysis

XAT 2007, was on expected lines. It was more difficult than last year’s paper and also included new question types. Progressive negative marking continued this year too and students came out of the centres attempting only about one-third of the questions. 50+ (with 70% accuracy) is a good number of attempts in this paper.

No. of sections : 3

No. of questions : 130

Negative mark : 1/3 for the 1^st 5 wrong answers in each section, ½ after that

Quantitative Ability

There were a total of 49 questions in this section. This included 4 questions from Data Sufficiency and 13 questions from Data Interpretation. The DI questions were all calculation intensive and very time-consuming. One of the DI sets involved 4 tables and was best left out. Even the other sets were fairly difficult and most students would have attempted only 1 set. Many of the questions in Quant were the Higher Maths variety. Students would have therefore had to scan the paper carefully for easy questions here, and for questions from Arithmetic.

Expected cut-off: around 5

Reasoning & Decision Making Ability

The reasoning area had sets of questions (4 sets with 5-6 questions each). What made these sets difficult was the fact that the sets could not be solved completely from the basic directions alone. Each question provided additional information which had to be incorporated to arrive at answers. This made it very time consuming. As a result students would not have been able to attempt more than 2-3 questions in 2 sets if they also wanted to look at the other questions.

Decision making questions involved reading a passage and then taking decisions based on the information provided there. One passage was quant-intensive and required students to calculate the probability of reaching a destination on time. Another passage dealt with HR issues. There were also questions dealing with Binary Logic (truth-tellers and liars) and calendars.

Expected cut-off: 7+/-1

Verbal Ability

While this section was not as difficult as in CAT, students would have still struggled with many questions. There were 4 passages with 4-6 questions. Though the passages were not very lengthy, two of those made for very difficult reading. There was also an exchange between 2 poets which, thankfully, was easy.

The Verbal area had questions on grammar, para-forming, logical reasoning, and rewriting sentences. While the number of attempts here would be more than in the other sections, students are also likely to make more mistakes here and lose marks.

Expected cut-off: around 10

At the end of the 2-hr objective test, students had to write a 1-page essay on “Economic growth without environmental damage – mirage or reality” Time given for this was 20 minutes.

Overall cut-off for XLRI: 26-27 for BM, 23-24 for PMIR

Like this Article? Please bookmark it on any of the following social bookmarking sites.