Finally me geting a chance to post the official analysis.
AIMCAT0517 Analysis
After the massacre of AIMCAT0516, it would have been a huge relief to find the AIMCAT0517 more attemptable. However, the fact that DI was pretty calculation-intensive didn't help matters and the gains that students would have made in the Verbal section would have been nullified in the DI section.
AIMCAT0517 too was a typical three-section paper with the Quantitative area being relatively easier when compared with some of the earlier AIMCATs. For once, the difficulty level in RC was manageable and hence the scores in the Verbal section will improve.
Overall, the highest score may hover around 75.
An IIM-call winning score in this paper would be around 46/47.
A person getting about 55 to 57 could have expected to get 3 to 4 calls if this were the actual CAT paper.
Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension
The RC passages were well selected from 4 different areas. The first passage was on the Physics, the second on Socialism/Marxism, the third was on Science/Philosophy the fourth on Art and Religion, and the fifth on economics. The selection of passages was such that there was something in it for every student. Good science students could have cracked the first four passages. Barring the odd question, most of the others were pretty straightforward and hence a good score in RC would be close to 10 marks in about 25 minutes.
Similarly, the Verbal section had quite a few easy questions, especially, the Match-the-following questions. The sentence correction questions (41 to 45) were moderately difficult. Though the words for questions 46 to 50 were simple, the choices were not and hence there is a chance of making a couple of errors in this set. The paragraph-forming questions though lengthy were not difficult.
Expected Cut-Off - 16+/-1
Quantitative Ability
If you were intimidated by the first three questions (51-53) and thought that the QA section was difficult, you should realize that it wasn't. The questions in Numbers area were: 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 76 to 78, 82, 83, 92, 93, 94, and 95. Out of these 14 questions, at least 6 of them were easily solvable. The set 76 to 78 though seemingly difficult, was a simple concept of the number of 3s in n! However, it is too much to expect students to attempt that question and get it right too. Those who attempted 71 to 73 would have been very disappointed to get them wrong just because left is not right! Q Nos. 54, 56, 62, 65, (68, 69, 70 - for students with Permutations and Combinations as a strength), 80, 88, 89, and 97 can be termed easy/medium as far as their difficulty level is concerned.
Expected Cut-Off - 9 +/- 1
Data Interpretation/Reasoning/DS
As mentioned earlier, the DI section was a little calculation-intensive. There were 8 sets of DI. Out of these, the first set (Questions 101 to 105) had three easy questions. However, students may not have understood the data (that figure given for Generation was the total of Public Utilities and Self-generating establishments) correctly and hence may have left that out. The second set, looked long and difficult whereas in reality it was simple. But many students would have left that out too. The easy set in DI was the Pie-chart set (Questions 109 to 111). The set of Questions 112 to 116 was difficult to understand as well as was calculation-oriented. The Bar graph set (Questions 117 to 119) had two easy questions. Again, if a student understood the relevant concept, the set of questions 120 to 122 would have been easy. Students should have attempted the set of questions 123 to 126, as it had three easy questions. Those students who did not attempt this should by now understand that to ensure good marks in DI, attempting all sets of DI will be of immense help as it is very difficult to say by just looking at the data whether there are any easy questions in that set or not. The last set on DI (Questions 145 to 14
also was concept-oriented.
The data sufficiency questions were easier than the ones that came in AIMCAT0516. With 8 such questions, giving about 6 minutes becomes imperative. Out of the 11 questions in reasoning, the set of questions 142 to 144 was not difficult and so were a couple of other individual questions. You should have given about 10 minutes to the reasoning section so that it could have fetched you around 5 marks net.
Expected Cut-Off - 10 +/ 1
Overall Cut-Off - 46 to 47
Wish you all the best for the Next One!
n so was the "one word multiple use" funda...check that up too while yer at it... 
they're all over the RCTs, CRTs, VPE, VATs as well....
... experienced fatigue while taking the test.. ( took too many tests last week.. suffering from "test mania") .. as a result completely screwed my strength area.. Quants that is.. i spent more than 12 mins on a particular question.. got into an ego clash.. and thus made a big fool of myself..
Linear Mode
