IRMA is not known to give surprises and this year's paper was no different from the papers of yesteryears. In fact, if anything, the predictability of the paper has gone up considerably and hence students who have written this exam after going through the replica of IRMA paper given by T.I.M.E. would have found this very comfortable to attempt.

The paper consisted of 200 questions and the time allotted for the same was 2 hours. As usual, there were 5 choices for each question - with 1 mark for every correct answer and -1/4 mark for every wrong answer.

The paper pattern is as follows:

An ideal number of attempts in this paper would have been close to 135+ questions.

Expected Cutoffs

Section I - 22-24
Section II - 18-20
Section III - 18-20
Section IV - 15-20

Overall Cutoff - 85+ for a call from IRMA

Analysis of Sections

Section-I

This section was the easiest section in the entire paper. This consisted of Cloze passage, Fill-in-the-blanks, Sentence correction, Paragraph forming and Reading Comprehension (one passage). The reading comprehension and paragraph forming questions were very easy and so were the sentence correction questions. The fill-in-the-blank and cloze passage questions required the student to know the correct usage of words which are in vogue and would have been very easy for a good student of English. A good student would have attempted almost all the questions in about 25 minutes and got a score of 25+.

Section-II

This section had 4 DI sets and 5 questions of DS along with the normal problem solving questions. Except for 2 sets of DI, which were lengthy to solve all other questions in the section can be termed as to be of easy to average difficulty. A good student would have attempted 30 plus questions in 40 minutes and could have made a 20+ score.

Section-III

Reasoning section has the usual controversial questions on Strong Argument/Weak Argument, Implications, and Data Sufficiency in reasoning. The section had a lot of attemptable/solvable questions and the only constraint to getting marks in this section would be the time available. By allotting close to 40 minutes, a good student would have attempted 30 plus questions getting at least a 20+ net score.

Section IV

Issues of social concern, is a section which is unique to IRMA. This time too the paper has questions ranging from all areas of social concern including agriculture, rural economy and finance, people and places in news, WTO and the like. A person who has gone through these areas would have found this section do-able. However, as expected, many students have struggled to attempt about 35 questions (though time availability was not the culprit!). A good score would be anything more than 15+ net.