XAT 2014 Exam Snapshot:

XAT 2014, conducted by XLRI Jamshedpur for admission to their Business Management and Human Resource Management programmes, was conducted successfully across the nation on Jan 05, 2014. The scorecard of XAT is used by several other institutes for selecting candidates for their MBA programme as well. XAT has the reputation of being the toughest MBA entrance exam and the 2014 edition lived up to the reputation. The test would have left many candidates wondering and would definitely been a test of patience and perseverance of the students.

The test had 2 parts - Part I and II. Part I constituted three sections viz Verbal Ability, Decision Making, Quantitative Aptitude and Data Interpretation and the second part had questions from General Knowledge. The overall duration of the test was 150 min (the instructions part suggested that 10 min be allocated for GK and the remaining time be used for answering other sections. Paper I was followed by the second paper for a duration of 20 min in which an essay was to be written. This was different from last year when GK was brought back into XAT and was administered along with the Essay writing part. The 3 sections on QA&DI, Decision Making and English Language were in the first part last year.

Even though it is not explicitly mentioned in the instructions, we understand that the trend of sectional cutoffs shall continue and therefore the candidates were expected to show their competence in all the areas. However, General Awareness and Essay writing shall be used for evaluation only after the initial screening, i.e., these will not be used for the short listing of candidates for the GDPI round.

The following is a brief snapshot of the question distribution: