XAT 2020 Analysis

The level of XAT 2020 was slightly easier than that of XAT 2019 as this time’ Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation’ was manageable. The major surprise this year was that many questions in a few sections and a complete section of Decision Making did not have negative marking. However this aspect was not clearly mentioned in the main instructions and therefore lot of students were not able to take the advantage of this feature. This year the number, of questions, was 75.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 28 questions respectively, a total of 75 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 to tough. The surprise was that RC questions did not have negative marking.Questions were based on various areas such as Reading Comprehension, Critical reasoning, Sentence Rearrangement, & grammar. The length of the passages was moderate. The RCs were based on “Knowledge becoming commodity”, and one was based on pointless jobs not reducing inspite of market economies. There was one RC based on a poem about “fire & ice by Robert Frost”. One RC was based on ‘unnatural sources of pleasure and habituation leading to emptiness’. The one was based on ‘terms like refugees/exile treated as non-negatives. 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.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. This time DM also did not have negative marking. 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 and options were too close. The questions were based on Caselets and Case Studies taken from various areas like business organization, small business units, Ethical Dilemmas, and context based problem and solution The cases touched many diverse areas like pollution, profitability, e-commerce, supply chain, business expansion. Overall difficulty level of the section was moderate.

Evaluation: Difficulty level of Quant and DI was moderate. In DI, there were two sets; one was based on revenue of four companies and it was doable. The other one was based on the GDP of different countries it was a little bit calculative. There was a set of 3 questions on Venn diagram and it was of moderate level. In Quant, the major focus was on Geometry with 6 questions on this topic which were of moderate type. The doable questions were from topics Percentage, Functions, TSD & Ratio etc.  There were 2 questions based on Algebra and they were relatively easy. The overall feel of this section was moderate.

There were 25 questions in general awareness consisting of Static GK based questions covering Books, , Geography, art forms of states , History etc. and Current Questions based on Science and Technology, Economic Data and General terms etc. The level of this section was moderate. 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.