XAT 2019 Analysis

The level of XAT 2019 was slightly tougher than that of XAT 2018. This year also the number, of questions, was 74. Total time for this section was 165 minutes. There was penalty for un-attempted questions (after 8 questions) and it was only of 0.10 marks. However this feature is not going to affect the overall score significantly. This year XAT excluded essay writing as announced. There were no NON-MCQ (TITA) questions as speculated before the exam.

The paper had two parts: Part I and Part II. Part I was main question paper and Part II was based on General knowledge. Part I had three sections A, B and C with 26, 21 and 27 questions respectively, a total of 74 questions. The three sections of Part I were followed by Part II that had 25 questions on General knowledge. The time available for completing the three sections and General Knowledge was 180 minutes. One was expected to answer first three sections in 165 minutes and General knowledge in 15 minutes. It was required for students to answer questions from all sections and expected to maximize score in each sections. General knowledge marks can be used by selective institutes at the time of final selection. These scores will not be used for short listing candidates for Interview/GD. The three sections were as follows:

The Verbal section was moderate. Questions were based on various areas such as Reading Comprehension, Critical reasoning, Sentence Rearrangement, contextual understanding in RCs, analogy and one question on vocabulary as well. The length of the passages was moderate. The RCs were based on “Gender equality, Perception & understanding of art by people, Liberal arts”, and one was correlation between mood swings and being creative. There was one RC based on a poem about “crossing the water” by Sylvia Plath. The options were very close in reading comprehension section and therefore it was time consuming. Almost half of the questions in RCs were critical reasoning based. There was one tone based question also .In order to answer the questions correctly it was imperative for the candidates to identify the traps set by the examiners.

Evaluation: All Decision Making questions carried equal marks. There were no questions based on analytical reasoning in this section. Decision Making consisted of 21 Questions based on contexts. Most questions were quite tricky. The questions were based on Caselets and Case Studies taken from various areas like business organization, small business units, Ethical Dilemma. The context in cases were based on introducing test for doping, selecting a place to start a business, training new recruits (HR), automobile company thinking of launching low price variant, should para-medics or doctors be made more responsible for patients’ satisfaction etc.    Overall difficulty level of the section was moderate.

Evaluation: Difficulty level of Quant and DI was moderate. There were 2 questions on Data Sufficiency; both were tricky. In DI, there were two sets; one was based on students enrolled in various subjects which was doable on close observation and the other was based on train schedule which had 1 sitter question and remaining to be best left untouched. In Quant, the major focus was Geometry and Trigonometry and formed a major chunk of the questions including questions on coordinate geometry and inverse etc. The doable questions were from topics Percentage, Profit Loss, Functions, Indices etc.  The overall feel of this section was moderate.

There were 25 questions in general awareness consisting of Static GK based questions covering Books, Awards, Geography, History etc. and Current Questions based on Science and Technology, Economic Data and General terms etc. The level of this section was on a little tougher side. Since there was no negative marking in this section so by using guesswork or by elimination of options, one could have got 3-4 questions correct in addition to what one knew actually.