We all know that XAT is one of the toughest exams of the Management Entrance season in India. XAT 2009 & XAT 2010 made sure that the students raise their preparation levels to take on XAT. However, when XAT2011 was unveiled, even the best prepared students were stumped, to say the least. The paper, while somewhat similar in pattern to the last 2 years, had pulled quite a few surprises on the students.

To start with, there was differential marking - questions in the paper carried marks ranging from 1 to 5.

The essay, was not just a topic which was given to the students, but a paragraph which was quite tough to comprehend. The students were expected to understand the passage and then write their take on their understanding, with justification.

These two could still be called the smaller of surprises. The biggest one was the difficulty level of the paper. 1 mark did not mean that the question was easy. And most of the 5 mark questions were out of the world - not to be solved in exam conditions. The Quant section brought back memories of IITJEE for many students.

Swept off one's feet by all these surprises, it is easy to give up hope on the exam. But, the students need to realise that a difficult paper would be difficult to everybody and hence the cut offs would be much lower than what was the norm in the last couple of years. The only point to beware of here is the differential marking system, which could tip the scales in favour of those who got some of the the 5'ers correct, while maintaining a decent accuracy rate across the paper. But, as they say, that is what separates the men from the boys.

Students would have come out of another XAT exam not knowing how well they fared. The key to approaching this paper was to keep one's cool and not persist with questions beyond a point. Those who went in with a "pre-fixed" number of questions would have found nowhere to run. Those who followed the reliable time allocation strategy   for sections would have come out less damaged.

Snapshot of the paper