But XAT is one of those papers which always have lengthy questions, difficult questions, tricky questions and , easy questions too. This is one of those papers which requires thorough preparation and tests most of your skills on the exam day. Students would have come out of the exam hall not knowing how well they fared. The key to approaching this paper was to keep cool and follow the tried and tested ‘TIME-allocation’ strategy and student should which questions to attempt and which ones not to attempt as some questions are extremely difficult and lengthy. Those who left the difficult questions and did not target a ‘pre-fixed’ number of questions would have been able to find the easy questions and have a good, balanced performance in all three sections – which is the key to succeed in XAT.
No. of Questions: 101
Total Marks: 101*
Marking Scheme: 1*
Negative marking: Differential Marking:
0.20 marks for first 5 incorrect answers in each section & 0.25 marks for each incorrect answer thereafter
Number of Sections: 3
Number of Choices: 5
Duration: 120 Min + 20 Min for Essay
Essay Topic: Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed
The test had three sections:
| Section | No. of Questions | Level of Diffuculty | |
| A | Verbal and Logical Ability | 31 | Difficult |
| B | Data Interpretation and Quantitative Ability | 40 | Very Difficult |
| C | Analytical Reasoning and Decision Making | 30 | Very difficult |
SECTION 1: VERBAL AND LOGICAL ABILITY
The Verbal and Logical Ability (VA/LA) section this time was quite tough as compared to XAT 2009. The focus this year was once again on inferential logic and critical reasoning. A lot of questions contained long paragraphs, which were quite difficult and what made them more dificlut was the closeness of the options. There were 4 RC passages, each one tough to interpret. Additionally, there were two Jumbled Paragraph questions, and an FIJ one, both of which were taxing to attempt. But as compared to to other sections This was probably the one section that would have helped students maximise their score and lend some respectability to the total number of attempts.
A score of 14 + can be considered excellent in this section. The cut off for this section shall be around 10-11.
SECTION B – DATA INTERPRETATION AND QUANTITATIVE ABILITY
This section comprised 26 questions based on Quantitative Ability, 2 on Data Sufficiency and 12 on Data Interpretation. This section was on the tougher side, with few easy ones.
Quantitative ability had mix of easy and difficult questions. The questions in this section were all based on concepts and they required good understanding of the topics. This section required selection of some easy questions in order to maximise the attempts.
Data interpretation was as usual the toughest section of the Paper. The XAT has that legacy of giving some extremely tough and lengthy DI questions and infact if you look to maximise your score in this section , just pick up two set of DI and read between the lines. The students who have extensively prepared for CAT should have attempted 2-3 sets .
A score of 13-14 can be considered excellent and the expected cutoff shall be around 10 .
Analytical Reasoning & Decision Making
No. of Questions: 30
This section was extremely lengthy and was quite time consuming. To achieve cut off in all sections students should have opted for another 5-8 minutes for this section. Two sets (Cross word and Puppies and pens) were on the easier side and should have been attempted. Decision making section has that legacy of troubling students and XAT 2010 was not at all different. One should have aimed for very high level of accuracy with low number of attempts.
A score of 12 can be considered excellent and the expected cut off shall be 8-9.
Over all cut off shall be around 30-32.
