XAT 09 Analysis: How experts rate the test

The consensus is that the XAT was tougher this year when compared to last year.

The three sections in XAT 09 were more or less balanced in terms of level of difficulty. A few problems in the QA/DI section were quite ambiguous. The problems in the AR section were not very challenging. The DM cases were intriguing, thought provoking and should have been avoided by the aspirants. The Verbal and Logical Ability section was challenging. The section was more inclined towards testing the literary skills of a candidate. The questions involving the knowledge of Metaphor, euphemism etc appeared for the first time in XAT and required proper understanding of these figures of speech. Among the 3 RC passages, one was an easy take.

The other two had questions, which required deep inferential understanding. It would have been wise to take a shot at critical reasoning questions as they only tested the basic understanding.

Overall, the cut-offs can be expected to be close to last year's level. Following table summarises an ideal situation.

Comparison with Last 3 year's XAT:

XAT exam has been found the difficult test continuously for last four years. Here is the table from Career Launcher which shows the comparison of XAT 09 from XAT 06-08.

Section-wise Analysis

English Usage & Reading Comprehension

It was a mix of all question types. Critical reasoning questions tested the basic fundamentals. There was an increase in the number of these questions, as compared to the past XAT papers. Surprisingly, Vocabulary made limited appearance in the form of a lone analogy question. There were three passages. The passages were short but equally challenging. The topics were management, linguistics and socio-politics. A good selection of questions would have helped you to score high in this section as most of the questions were inference-based.

Overall, an attempt of 18-20 questions & a score of 10+ was definitely possible.  

Analytical Reasoning and Decision Making Ability

This time it was XAT's turn to test your logical skills. In this section of 31 questions, 19 were on Analytical Reasoning and 12 on Decision Making Ability. Most of the AR sets were of average difficulty level and at least 2 sets are definitely manageable during the given time frame. On the other hand, the Decision Making Ability questions were intriguing.  

Overall, the section had a high difficulty level. 13-14 attempts with an investment of 40 minutes would have been ideal. 8 to 9 seem to be a good net score.

Analytical Reasoning:

Set 1: It involved data mapping regarding couples participating in a singing competition. The parameters were their names (male member and their female counterpart), the names of their respective teams, and the points earned by them. The array was of dimension 4 x 4. This set was easy and should have been attempted.

Set 2: It involved data mapping regarding visiting faculty members taking classes on different days of the week on different topics. The parameters were their names, the subjects they taught, the day of the week on which they have taken the class and the exact time in which the class started. The array was again of dimension 4 x 4. This set was moderately difficult and should have been attempted.

Set 3: It involved data mapping regarding different students studying in various Engineering Colleges having different ratings. The parameters were their names, surnames the names of their respective colleges and their ratings. The array was of dimension 5 x 4. This set was average to difficult and may have been avoided.

Set 4: It involved data mapping regarding different farmers ploughing different stages in various segments of a circle. These segments are starting from a definite point and ending at a definite point on the circle. The parameters were their Farmers (their identification numbers), stages of cultivation and the points from which those segments are starting. The array was of dimension 5 x 3. This set was average to difficult and may have been avoided.

Quantitative Ability & Data Sufficiency:

This section was of standard difficulty level as expected of XAT paper. One remarkable aspect of this section is reduction of number of algebra questions from 13 to 5 this year as compared to the previous year. But at the same time total number of questions was also reduced from 44 to 38. Also relatively there were more arithmetic questions compared to last year.

Data Interpretation

There were 4 DI sets — 2 sets on Tables, 1 case let and 1 on Bar diagram—with moderate difficulty level.

Set 1: The Set with Bar diagram involving the production Soda Ash was lengthy and one particular question was ambiguous. But this set should have been attempted at any cost, because this was one of the easiest in this section and it contained 5 questions.

Set 2: The Other set with the Cost and sales price of different food items produced by a sweetshop was also controversial in the sense that the line graphs given above the table had no apparent bearing with the given data. It had only 2 questions.

Set 3: It involved a table depicting the sales, cost and leftover data of a cake manufacturing chain for the year 1993 to 2004. It had 4 questions out of which one of them was seemingly erroneous in which number of correct statements was to be identified. It involved bit of lengthy calculation but should have been attempted.

Set 4: This set involved a production cost and sales data of a proposed 'pen drive' manufacturing unit. First two questions were on Break-even point and profit in different scenario. These two questions were manageable and should have been attempted. The last question in this set involved interest cost was ambiguous and probably erroneous as well. It did not mention any time frame for calculating the interest cost.

Essay

The topic for this year was "The Inherent vice of Capitalism is unequal sharing of blessings and the inherent virtue of Socialism is equal sharing of misery".

An interesting topic, which required some awareness of the two political and economic systems. Some points worth exploring in this essay were:

1) The historical development of Capitalism as a major force shaping the modern world.

2) The rise of Socialism as a countering force as visualized by Karl Marx and other thinkers.

3) Major Socialist movements such as the Russian Revolution.

4) How Capitalism came to be viewed as a credo and how the world got bi-polarized into the Capitalist and Socialist blocks.

5) Lessons from the 20th century- how Socialism and Communism failed to stem the economic collapse of Russia. Ironically enough, the virtue 'of equal sharing of misery failed to sustain socialist governments'.

6) The enduring appeal of Capitalism even though the vice of unequal distribution of wealth persists- example of how erstwhile Socialist regimes like China are embracing market Capitalism today.

Cut-Offs  

After XLRI, the expected cut-offs of other institutes of XAT 09 by Career Launcher is below:  

Likely Cut-Offs for other institutes:

XAT 2009 had fewer questions as compared to XAT 2008, but the surprise quotient and element of toughness were higher. There were some innovative and tough question in the Verbal Ability section and some sets of Data Arrangement in Analytical and Logical Reasoning were tough. Apart from these the paper was your traditional XAT paper.  

Verbal and Logical Ability

This year the section was concentrated on Reading Comprehension and English Usage. There were 17 questions on six small passages. The questions on Sentence Correction, Para Jumble and Verbal Analogy were on traditional lines where as questions on Logical Conclusion, Type of Arguments, Author Contention, Best Summarizes the idea, find the Evidence and Draw a Metaphore etc., were new to students.

An attempt of 15 + questions in a time span of 35 minutes would have been sufficient for this section.

Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation

In QA section there were questions on Basic Maths, Higher Maths, Data Interpretation and Data Sufficiency. The basic maths questions were on Linear and Quadratic Equations, Profit and Loss, Time, Speed and Distance, Logic Based Maths, Clocks, Geometry and Numbers. Whereas the representatives from the Higher Maths were Permutation and Combination, Probability, Coordinate Geometry, Functions and Maxima Minima. There were four DI sets out of which three were containing three questions each and one set was of five questions. Two questions were on five options standard DS. 

An attempt of 16 + questions in a time span of 45 minutes would have been sufficient for this section.

Analytical Reasoning and Decision Making

In Analytical Reasoning section, there were questions from Data arrangement, Business Judgement, Decision Making and Miscellaneous LR questions.

An attempt of 15 + questions in a time span of 40 minutes would have been sufficient for this section.

Essay Writing

The essay topic of XAT 09 was 'The inherent vice of Capitalism is the unequal sharing of Blessings; the inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries'.

Expected Cut-offs by PT Education for XAT 09

XAT 2009 Analysis: 'A tough test'

The XAT held on 4th January 2009, kept up its reputation of being a difficult test. It was more of a test of knowledge than general aptitudes. In terms of marking scheme and negative marking, there was nothing new – the same pattern of progressive negative marking was present. This year the total number of questions was further reduced.

Verbal & Logical Reasoning  

This section was a reading intensive one and the focus was more on reasoning and vocabulary.

The types of questions asked and the types of reading comprehension passages that featured in the test clearly indicate that the test expected students to know the language and its intricacies quite thoroughly.  

Reading Comprehension

There were 10 questions based on three reading comprehension passages. Unlike last year there were no questions on caselets in the verbal ability section.

The topics covered were:

Politics (Green parties in mainstream politics)

Linguistics (The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or Linguistic Relativity hypothesis)

Organizational Ecology  

The passages were short but the abstract topics they presented and the writing style acted as impediments in comprehending the same.  

Verbal Ability  

Last year in the Verbal Ability set, XAT had only paragraphs and fill in the blanks. This year the test re-introduced the critical reasoning questions apart from retaining the jumbled paragraph questions. Some grammar based questions also featured in the test. Moreover, some new patterns of questions testing one's knowledge of figures of speech were introduced. Critical Reasoning: There were 13 questions on critical reasoning that were based on small passages. Most of the questions were challenging because one had to read the passage, understand the line of reasoning and then reason out the correct answer. The options were close and at times confusing.  

Grammar Based: There were 3 sentence correction questions based on concepts like word forms, moods and conditional and tense forms.  

Jumbled Paragraph: There were only 2 questions in this set, both taken from the book Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy by Will Dudley.  

Data Interpretation and Quantitative Ability

This section comprised 26 questions based on Quantitative Ability, 2 on Data Sufficiency and 10 on Data Interpretation. This section was tough, except for a few problems, which were lengthy but comparatively easy to solve.  

Quantitative Ability

The question based on Five points, whose abscissa and ordinates were changing was a really difficult one. The problem based on a function 'f' was apparently difficult but it required just a basic knowledge of Trigonometry. Problem based on Permutation and Combination (5 passengers and 7 stations) was simple and one should have attempted it. Problem from Geometry tested only the basic understanding of the subject. In a nutshell, one can say that most of the questions in the Problem solving section were conceptual. The selection of easier questions would have helped to maximize the scores.  

Analytical Reasoning and Decision Making

This section was easy and questions were based on Linear/ Matrix Arrangement and Logic Puzzles.  

Decision Making

There were two caselets with 4 questions each. The cases were easy to read and understand, but attempting the questions correctly required a lot of analysis. The options were also very close that added to the difficulty. One of the questions required passing knowledge of mathematics. In this section, a decent attempt would be 15 to 17 questions with a possible score of 11+ marks.  

ESSAY

The topic for the essay was "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." The student had 20 minutes to write a 200-250 words essay.