*The marks per question were not specified. An assumption of 1 mark per question has been made here

XAT2009 was easily the toughest paper of the management exam season so far this year. XAT2009 was yet another proud addition to the long list of legendary papers that XAT has given us over the years. XAT2009 can be classified as a ‘Very Difficult’ paper and the cut-offs could witness a downward trend as compared to last year. However this could be counterbalanced by the increased number of test takers. As in all ‘Difficult’ papers the emphasis is on a proper plan and a sound ‘time-allocation’ strategy. Those who had forgotten this golden mantra might have tried to compensate for the difficult sections that they encountered early on by spending some more time there. This would have led to a cascading problem in the next two sections attempted, as each section was quite difficult and which ultimately left many with very little time to attempt the third section. Those who could anticipate the difficulty level upfront and did not target a ‘pre-fixed’ number of questions would have been able to stick to the time limits and have a good, balanced performance in all three sections – which is the key to get the coveted call from XLRI. Coming to the composition of the paper - the paper had three sections viz. Verbal & Logical Ability, Analytical Reasoning & Decision Making and Data Interpretation & Quantitative Ability with a total of 104 questions. Though the sections did not come as a surprise yet the reduced number of questions meant that students had a limited set of Qs to choose from.

Snapshot of the paper

The break-up of the XAT2009 paper and an optimum time allocation strategy are given in the table below.