Exam Snapshot

The management exam season for 2008 begins with IRMA and what a beginning it was. There was joy in three sections and grief in the fourth. Inspite of this, IRMA was an ideal paper as it provided students with the right kind of practice before the ‘big’ one coming up next Sunday. The paper can be classified as “Easy-Moderate” in terms of the difficulty level and had no major surprises compared to that of 2007. However in such papers most students rack up impressive scores which means that the cut-offs go up significantly. In terms of getting a call for the GDPI stage, in the past it always boiled down to the performance in the ‘Issues of Social Concern’ section. However with this section being almost impossible this year, the scores in this section would be quite low and the calls would eventually be decided on ones performance in the other three sections. The ideal number of attempts in this paper would be about 110-120 and this coupled with an accuracy level of 80% should help one get a call.

English Comprehension
No. of Questions: 40

IRMA gave a radically different English Comprehension section this year, one that had flair of rural management. There was a cloze test on which there 15 Qs and a passage which had 25Qs on it!! The cloze test related to a passage on agriculture and the measures needed to be taken to encourage it. Here a score of 6-7 was possible in about 10-12 minutes. The passage was an extract from a convocation address delivered by Y V Reddy at the Acharya N G Ranga Agricultural University in 2008. There were 17 Qs on the passage and 8 Qs on Vocabulary based on highlighted words in the passage. A good time allocation for the RC would be around 15-20 min. The cut-off for this section is expected to be around 20. A score in the range of 27-28 should be considered to be very good.

The Quant section of IRMA includes topics from Arithmetic, Data Interpretation and Speed Math as part of this section. The questions on Arithmetic were very easy and were based on the straight forward application of formula and did not call for any reasoning to be exercised. A score of 4-5 was possible in around 10 min. There were four DI sets which were quite easy and involved calculations and very little reasoning. The only limiting factor in getting a huge score in this section would be time. A good time allocation for this section would be around 35 min. The cut-off score should be around 24. A score in the range of 31-32 should be considered to be very good.

For those not acquainted with the Critical Reasoning variety of Qs, this section would have proven to be the toughest (next only to the Issues of Social Concern section). The easy Qs that would have boosted the scores were the 10 Qs on Decision Making pertaining to the ‘eligibility for a loan’. Similarly the questions on ‘Odd One Out’ were quite straight forward and would have contributed to attaining the cut-off score. The logic puzzle pertaining to students, their specializations and the games played would have given good returns once a student put in around 4-5 minutes in tackling it. Of all the critical reasoning Q’s the ones on ‘Courses of Action’ were easy and should have been attempted. The questions on ‘Strong Arguments’ and ‘Assumptions’ are always tricky and it was no different in this paper. All in all any attempts in the range of 30-35 with an accuracy of around 80% would be considered good. A good time allocation for this section would be around 35-40 min. The cut-off score for this section should be around 22. A score of around 25 should be considered to be very good.

This section was the toughest ever in the history of IRMA! The questions were very verbose with choices that would have puzzled even the seasoned veterans. Students would have had the feeling that even with a lot of reading this section would have been a difficult nut to crack. The questions were very descriptive and required a lot more reading than a typical General Awareness question. This was further complicated by the very tricky and difficult answer choices given. Most questions pertained to Government schemes, definitions of terms, economics, agriculture and poverty.. A good time allocation for this section would be around 15-20 min. The cut-off score would plummet to new lows and should be around 6-7. A score of around 12+ should be considered to be very good.  

Sectional and Overall Cut-Off

Final selection will be done on the basis of overall performance in Written Test, PI and GD. The marks obtained in PI and GD will be normalized across evaluating panels. The marks obtained in the Written Test and the normalized marks obtained in PI and GD will be reduced to equivalent marks out of 50, 40 and 10 marks, respectively. An overall merit list will be prepared based on total marks obtained out of these 100 marks. Such listing will be done separately for different categories of the applicants and the required number of candidates will be selected from different

categories in their order of merit. The cut-offs for the reserved category will be about 10% lower than those for the general category.

IRMA Fact file

** The cut-off for XIMB (RM) program is expected to be around 80