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

XAT2010 was easily the toughest paper of the management exam season so far this year. XAT 2010 was similar to XAT2009 - the paper had three sections viz. Verbal & Logical Ability, Analytical Reasoning & Decision Making and Data Interpretation & Quantitative Ability with a total of 101 questions. However students would have really liked this paper as it gave them an opportunity to showcase their preparation, something which CAT denied them! This was a very difficult paper with all the ingredients of a Bollywood potboiler; lengthy questions, difficult questions, tricky questions and yes, easy questions too. Students would have come out of the exam hall not knowing how well they fared. The key to approaching this paper was to keep cool and follow the tested ‘TIME-allocation’ strategy. Those who left the difficult questions and did not target a ‘pre-fixed’ number of questions would have been able to find the easy questions and have a good, balanced performance in all three sections – which is the key to get the coveted call from XLRI.

Snapshot of the paper

The break-up of the XAT2010 paper and an optimum time allocation strategy are given in the table below.