Analytical Reasoning & Decision Making

The Analytical & Decision Making section was one of the tougher sections in this paper. The section was extremely lengthy and was a ‘black hole’ in terms of the time it consumed. Students should have budgeted for an extra 10 mins in this section on account of the lengthy and difficult Qs sets in it. The Qs on ‘Puppies and Pens’ and the ‘Crossword’ were amongst the easier ones and should have been attempted. The set on binary logic involving ‘9 Financial accountants’ was one of the toughest in the paper and should have been avoided. The Decision Making area has always troubled students in XAT and XAT2010 was no different. The Decision Making sets though ‘easy’ to read always had two close options which made the process of selecting the right answer a very tedious and time consuming one. The set on the ‘Racket club’, though an oblique reference to the current WADA controversy involving the Indian Cricket team was one such set where the options were just too close for comfort. The sets on 'Guruji's Guidance' and the one on 'LAM disease' were amongst the easier ones and should have been attempted. All in all this was a tough section and the right strategy for this section was to identify a few sets and aim for a high level of accuracy. Identifying the time consuming logic puzzles and leaving them out would have been the key to doing well in this section.

The expected score for this section should be around 5-7 in about 40 min. A score of 12+ should be considered excellent. The cut-off is expected to be around 7-8.