On the whole the level of the test wasmoderate to tough. The test contained many moderate and difficult questions and hence the important factor was selection of appropriate questions to attempt.Quantsection was slightly tougher than reasoning section. Verbal section waseasy to moderate. The key to getting a good percentile was time management and selection of questions.
Author of the first passage (1-4) first discussed the Fermi paradox and then some weird responses on the same, given by different scientist. Some of these responses propose that aliens could be hiding in underground oceans; or they are imprisoned on some other planets; or that aliens are actually robots. The level of difficulty of this passage was moderate with two difficult questions. The second passage (5-8) was about evils of grading. Author presented different arguments to explain that grading is not just misevaluation of pupils’ achievement; it also is often humiliating as it demoralizes students, who fail to secure good marks. Also, grades are just teacher’s subjective evaluation of students’ potential. This passage was easy to moderate in difficulty level. The third passage (9-12) pragmatically discussed the bad effects of sound, also referred to as noise by the author. So, sound can harm people not just mentally, but also physically and emotionally depending upon a lot of factors. This passage was relatively easy in difficulty level. In the fourth passage (13-16)author has subtly criticized the uninformed American policies and decisions; and misuse of technologies to further spread these ideas. Through this example author has discussed the abuse of technology and parochialism of American politicians and media. Further he talks about the agitation and chaos that opinionated news can evoke. This passage had one easy, one moderate and two difficult questions. Questions (17-19) were based on sentence rearrangement and these questions were of difficult level. Questions (20-22) were para-summary questions and were moderate to difficult- level questions. Questions 23 and 24 were based on ‘fit the sentence appropriately’ in the paragraph. These questions were easy in difficultly level. Overall, the verbal section of this mock was easy to moderate. One could score 90+ percentile if one attempts around 16 to 18 questions with 75-80% accuracy.
The difficulty level of DI was Hard. There were 7 easy, 5 medium and 8 difficult questions in this section. The first and forth block (Wholesale dealer of hardware, the premises of a bank are to be renovated) were easiest and were must do and by attempting a couple of questions from rest of the blocks, one could have fetched a very good percentile.
In this section, one could have fetched 90+ percentile by attempting 8-10 questions with approx. 80% accuracy.
Students found this section easier than DI this time. The Quantitative section had 6 easy, 5 medium and 11 difficult questions. Selection of questions was important to crack this section. There were questions from varied topics like Geometry, Basic Numbers, Basic Algebra, Progression and Series, Arithmetic (Percentages/Time and Work/Mixtures/Percentages/SI-CI/Ratios). A good student could have scored 90+ percentile by attempting around 7-9 questions with approx. 80% accuracy.
The overall feel of the paper was moderate to tough, though for the students who knew how to manage the time available to the best i.e., not wasting much time in lengthy and difficult questions, could easily manage an overall good attempt. Quant section was slightly tougher than reasoning section Verbal section was easy to moderate. Most of the questions in quant section were from Arithmetic, Algebra, Number system and Geometry. For verbal section, one should have good reading skills as there were 4 RC’s and also a few questions based on paragraph summary. One must focus on contextual vocabulary as well to understand and score well in RC passages. Questions such as sentence rearrangement and placement questions require analysis and knowledge of tricks to answer the questions. It is not advisable to spend too much time on TITA questions especially in the verbal section.
