XAT 2019 Exam Analysis
The XAT 2019 exam concluded at 1 PM on 6th January 2019. Overall, the exam was on the same lines as that of last year's paper. In terms of difficulty level, it was on the higher side and, therefore, turned out to be toughest MBA exam of the season. In the paper, there were no Non-MCQ questions, which was quite contrary to what aspirants had expected. There weren't really any surprises in the paper, apart from some tricky Verbal questions and some really difficult DM questions. This year, the paper had no Essay writing section as well.
The XAT 2019 paper was divided into two parts i.e. Part A consisting of 3 sections including Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning, Decision Making, and Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation. Part B, on the other had, comprises a single section on General Knowledge.
While Part A had to be taken within the duration of 165 minutes, Part B had a time limit of 15 minutes.
In Part A, every question had a weightage of 1 mark and there was a negative marking of 0.25 mark for every wrong answer. There was no negative marking in Part B. The penalty for not attempting more than 8 questions has been increased from 0.05 marks to 0.10 for every such question.
Part B, which comprised GK had 25 questions. There was no change or negative marking in this section. The level of difficulty was the same as last year.
Section-wise XAT Exam Analysis 2019
Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning
This section was more difficult in comparison with the previous year's paper, perhaps due to Verbal section. Reading Comprehension dominated the section with 4 passages followed by 3 questions each. The passages were from areas of Psychology, Art and Social issues. There was a Poem Comprehension as well and it had 2 questions, which were quite tricky. There were 2 para jumble questions, which were quite easy. The Fill in the Blanks questions were tough and some of the CR questions were really tricky. Since this was a time-consuming section, it could have taken around 50 minutes for students to answer this section.
A candidate could have attempted 16-18 questions with 70% accuracy.
Decision Making and Analytical Reasoning
The difficulty level of the Decision Making section was the same as the previous year's paper. The section was dominated by situational decision making and it had 18 questions. No questions were asked from Mathematical/Analytical Reasoning, thus candidates might have tried to answer 2-3 more questions. However, sequencing questions were more in number, which caused the students to attempt a lesser number of questions. There were 3 cases (Raket, Limo, ice-cream = music), which turned out to be the same as in papers of previous years. There were no singlets and, therefore, it was easier for students to read.
Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation
This section was slightly on the tougher side as compared to XAT 2018. However, one of the DI sets turned out to be quite difficult. There were 21 QA questions and majority of them were based on Geometry and Algebra (including co-ordinate and Trigonometry). Most of the Arithmetic questions were doable whereas Geometry questions were quite tough to attempt. There were 2 sets comprising 6 questions in total in Data Interpretation. A few questions in DI seemed ambiguous.
General Knowledge
General Knowledge section was on the same lines as last year as far as the difficulty level is concerned. Out the total 25 questions, majority of the questions were single-statement based. Some of the multiple-statements based questions had more than one correct statement. Static GK (Economy, Geography, Science and Technology) and Current GK (Business economy, personalities, awards, and sports) were the key areas from where the questions were asked in the paper. A good attempt in this section could be 12-14 questions fetching a score of 7-8.
