NMAT 2016 Exam Analysis for Admission to MBA Colleges in India

NMAT 2016 started on 7th Oct 2016 to screen the students for the admission to various management programmes in NMIMS (Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad campus) and other MBA colleges accepting its scores. Test taking window is between 7th October ’16 and 20th December ’16.

Programmes & Seats

The examination is conducted for the following programmes:

• MBA in Finance, Information, Marketing, Operations & Decision – 500 Seats
• MBA in Human Resources – 60 Seats
• MBA in Pharmaceutical Management – 60 Seats
• PGDM (Bengaluru Campus) – 120 Seats
• PGDBM (Hyderabad Campus) – 60 Seats

NMAT, conducted by GMAC™, is of 120-minute duration. There is no negative marking – hence, it is advisable to make informed guesses and attempt all questions without the fear of deduction in marks. The first slot started on 7 Oct and since then students did not experience any technical problem in the Examination. Across the sections, it has been possible to solve close to 90 questions in 120 minutes. While some questions could have been solved with educated guess (since there was no negative marking) most of the questions were doable with a bit of extra effort. In Language Skill section, students with a slow reading speed might have faced a challenge as there were sectional time constraints (32 questions in 22 min). Test takers got different papers in the same slot. The difficulty level of the questions was different across the sections for different students. The difficulty level of the overall paper so far has been average

The paper pattern has been as below:

Logical Reasoning

This section was relatively easy – some questions were of moderate level of difficulty. The number of questions from the Verbal Logic section has been on the higher side. Critical Reasoning questions are there but mostly easy type. A student should have a good reading speed to attempt these questions as the option choices are confusing and close as usual. The course of action question is aimed at testing decision-making ability. The rest of the verbal logic questions are of a moderate level of difficulty. Some LR sets have multiple questions . Some questions, particularly the input-output questions, have been tricky and confused students. The non-verbal questions have also been slightly tough. Even then, overall, the difficulty level of the section was not very high. An attempt of 25-30 is a realistic attempt, particularly because there are no negative marks.

Questions on this section have more or less covered the following topics:

Quantitative Skills

The questions in Quantitative Aptitude section have been of an easy-moderate level of difficulty. This section has been relatively easier than the other sections; The numbers of questions are 48 and time available is 60 min. The section has mostly covered questions from Arithmetic , and Numbers system. The DI and DS questions are coming from diverse topics such as Numbers, Geometry and Algebra. DI and DS questions have been slightly difficult and time taking. It is quite a doable paper and no negative mark make the guess work easy. A well-prepared student should be able to attempt 30-35 questions in this section.

Questions on this section have more or less covered the following topics:

Language Skills

This section has covered fill in the blank (Vocabulary based), a cloze test. Both types of questions have tricky option choices. This section is a time-consuming section but has minimum time available. Hence, a student cannot afford to waste precious minutes in this section. Then RC passages have four questions each and questions are mostly factual in nature and the options were easy to eliminate. The sentence correction questions are tricky as usual. A total of 5 questions (5 Sentence Para Jumble) para-jumble questions have been there of which a few are easy and a few are difficult. The synonym and antonym questions were quite easy and have commonly used words. An attempt of 20-25questions will be good with some amount of educated guess.

Questions on this section have more or less covered the following topics:

The result of NMAT by GMAC™ will be announced within 4 to 5 weeks after the day you have written the test. You will get the scaled score. However, the percentile scores will be calculated after all the test takers have taken their exam(s). Please refer to the official website of NMAT for final result announcement date. Test takers have an option of appearing more than once (up to three maximum attempts, including “no shows”). This provides test takers with an opportunity to improve their scores. GMAC™ allows a test taker to send his/her scores of NMAT to 7 programmes of accepting Universities as part of the registration fees.

Important Dates for NMAT 2016:

NMAT Test Window Period - 7th October 2016 - 20th December 2016

NOTE* - The 2016 NMAT exam can be taken 3 times within the test window period.