The IIFT 2003 paper was almost on the expected lines and there were no major surprises except for the decrease in the number of sections from the usual 5 to 4.  

All the ingredients of an IIFT paper were seen in this year’s paper too with quantitative section being easy as usual and the paper loaded with about 50 GK questions. The RC section was particularly easy as compared to that of the other similar exams. The questions were very direct and simple to locate in the short passages. For a good student with a decent vocabulary, the antonyms and synonyms and the correction of sentences would have been no problem at all.  

As is wont for IIFT, there was a differential marking system (for different sections) and a smart student should have spent more time on the Quant and Reasoning sections. Each quant question carried 3/4^th mark while each reasoning question carried ½ mark. The questions in Verbal/RC and GK areas carried 2/5^th mark each.  

Since there were no negative marks, all the 196 questions should have been attempted. The overall cut off for this paper is expected to be about 65 marks.