Students who thought the era of difficult papers got over with CAT would have been in for a very nasty surprise. XAT 2006 was one of the most difficult XAT papers of all times, and is definitely the most difficult paper of this season.

Even before opening the paper, students would have started worrying because the instructions very clearly stated that there is progressive negative marking. It is one-third for every wrong answer up to 5 incorrect answers per section. Beyond that it is half the marks for the question. This meant that students could not afford to guess too many answers.

Verbal Ability

This section had 40 questions – 16 in VA and 24 in RC. VA questions included questions on para-formation, selecting the correct/ incorrect replacement, and 4 questions on LR. Since many of the answers had “none of the above” as a choice, one could not be too sure of the answers. There were 5 passages in RC, each between 500 and 700 words in length, and one of these was a dialogue between a Japanese executive and an American executive. The questions were mostly inference based.

A good score in this section would be anything above 12-13 marks while the cutoff is likely to be around 9 marks.

Quant

For the first time, there were questions on Integration and Differentiation (1 each). There were also the usual share of questions from Probability, Functions & Graphs, Numbers, and Series. There were a few easy questions too but it was not too easy to locate them. Questions in DS were also clubbed with Quant.

Expected cutoff in this section is 6+/-1 and only very good students would have managed to score more than 10.

DI & Logical Ability

There were 43 questions in this section. There was 1 easy set in DI which was basically a table giving details of political parties, seats won by them, and alliances formed. The other sets talked of economic parameters and the representations included pie-charts, line-graph, and tables .

The sets of questions in LA were mostly difficult, and there were too many conditions in every set. The questions also were of the kind “which of the following must be true/ cannot be true” and this made it even more difficult to be sure of the answer.

The cutoff is likely to be around 7 marks.

Overall cutoff for XLRI: 33+/-1 for BM, 30+/-1 for PMIR

Cutoffs for other institutes:

XIMB: 27-28
BIM: 25-26
MICA: 23-24
GIM: 21-22

GOOD LUCK for FMS!