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Expert speak on XAT 2013, part 2. Essay topic lame


Parasharan Chari

Xavier Aptitude Test (XAT) generally symbolises the end of the new year celebrations with a paper that manages to surprise the aspirants with questions that are fresh yet standard, time consuming & tricky. And just in case the questions don’t look tricky, you will find an option that screams ‘none of the above’ at you and the foundation stands rocked!

This year, XAT changed the pattern with an ‘extension’ of 40 minutes and added General Awareness as a subsection. From what we infer, this has been done to bring in diversity to the batch. The look and feel of the section was familiar with questions on ‘Chairman of the planning commission of India’, ‘CPI & WPI’, ‘names of the companies & products’, ‘Rajat Gupta’, ‘imagining India’ & ‘V Kurien’. But then, digging deep might be challenging for an aspirant as the horizon of questions was broad and nothing could have ensured his preparedness was complete for such a paper. We, however, speculate that the score in GK might not be considered for the cut-off for calls, it could be a hygiene factor coming to picture post-calls or during the interviews. A score of 12+ in this section can be considered a good score.
As far as the essay is considered, ‘corruption’ was a lame topic by XAT standards. With every available news channel having devoted hours on this subject corruption in the whole of 2012, it wouldn’t have been a difficult topic to write an essay on. Structure of thought, right usage of language and data to support your stand would play an important role in the grading of the essay. Again, the essay might not contribute to the calls but then it will be play a role during the interviews wherein a candidate might be asked to justify his stand which might help the interviewer assess the thought process & depth of understanding of the topic.
For the aptitude part of this year’s XAT, it can be termed a balanced paper with all sections equally challenging. The section wise analysis can be as follows:
Verbal & Logical Ability Section: It was a teaser with 12 questions of Verbal ability and 18 questions of Reading Comprehension. When I used the word ‘teaser’ I mean something that will ensure an aspirant is drawn towards it, something that ensures an aspirant puts in 20 mins of his time behind these 12 questions, something that ensures an aspirant attempts it and even after all this something that will prompt a student to make mistakes. These 12 questions, if attempted, will give an above average aspirant approximately 8 correct, 4 incorrect answers. The teasers had 3 each of deductive logic based questions, sentence-jumbling questions, article-preposition based fill in the blanks and phrase-replacement questions. The questions can be put in the category of tricky questions with moderate difficulty. The RCs were reasonably dense with a good mix of closely placed options.
Quantitative Ability & Data Interpretation demanded a sub-section analysis! The data interpretation part had 3 sets in it out of which 1 was so-called-ambiguous, 1 was ugly cosmetically but manageable while the third was plain irritating. Quantitative Aptitude had 26 questions. For the first time, XAT slightly moved out of concept-based-questions and included some logic based questions as well. At least 5 questions were sitters and the presence of the ‘none of the above’ ensured a reasonably less confident taker would spend double the time solving a question he knows!
Decision Making Section was manageable this year. The presence of 2 critical reasoning questions should have surely comforted the XAT taker and rushing through these would have just been a 2-3 minute task. Then the calculation-based-decision-making sets along the lines of data analysis and the probability based set, were a handful. An above average aspirant would have attempted one of these 2 sets giving it close to 6-8 minutes and moved on. There were 2 single questions which weren’t worth attempting considering the poor return on investment of time. Out of the 5 sets of decision making, 2 were easy, 1 was moderate and 2 were tough.
A score of 41 should be able to ensure a percentile in the range of 95-97. Last year, XLRI tried reducing the cut-offs to work for achieving a “profile. The cut-off for XLRI was 90 percentile last year and that of XIMB (ironically) was 92% percentile. Discounting last year’s pattern, we can surely say that with a score of 41, an aspirant should be able to get an XLRI-BM call and with a score of 37+ he should be able to manage an XLRI-PM and IR call. XIMB should be close to 33.
All in all, by XAT standards –a laborious, balanced and heavy exam– minus the boring essay topic, the couple of ambiguous questions and the quant question wherein “(is it a repeat)” comment has been printed by mistake (something that will put the final proofreading authority in a slight discomfort)!!
Best of luck for the ’50 hours to go’ CAT countdown!
(The author Parasharan Chari is an alumnus of SP Jain and is currently serving as the Chief Operating Officer at Endeavor Careers and is also associated with the design and development of its online testing portal www.CatGurus.com.)
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