Jamshedpur: The B-school exam season is coming to a close as Xavier Aptitude Test or XAT 2023 was concluded on Sunday, January 8, 2023. Held in a single slot, from 2 pm to 5:10 pm, the uniquely designed exam quizzed students on their understanding of risks and success apart from testing their aptitude.
Much like CAT 2022, XAT 2023 also sprung new questions that the students did not anticipate. After a four-year gap, XAT’s decision-making section quizzed candidates on quant-based or mathematical decision-making questions, where students had to asses numeric data to come to a win-win decision instead of the usual situational questions that students have to decipher.
Quants become a tough task
Quantitative Aptitude and Data interpretation came in next as another challenging section for students. “The section was a good mix of tricky and solvable questions. The quantitative part had some easy questions that could be solved instantly, the others needed you to be very thorough with your conceptual knowledge of Math. The data interpretation was more confusing, a question that was asked had four graphs, which threw most of us off. The important thing to do was to keep calm and go through it carefully, once we did, we realised that it was not that tough at all, but time-consuming due to the calculations,” said Manav Shah, a business school aspirant from IMS Ahmedabad.
The Verbal ability and logical reasoning section ranged from easy to moderately difficult, where the grammatical questions were easier but the reading comprehensions were more complicated than what students had imagined. “The RCs were difficult to comprehend and I had to go over them more than once to understand what they were really trying to say,” said Anshul Rathod, a student from IMS Ahmedabad who took his first crack at XAT. The section presented four RCs, alongside grammatical questions which asked students to solve jumbled paragraphs, incorrect punctuations, and sentence
Essay becomes the make or break question
The second part of the question paper was comprised of the General Knowledge and Essay Writing sections. The GK section revolved around famous books and their authors, the FIFA world cup, and static GK questions that were easier than expected for most students. The second part, which required students to compose an essay posed unique conundrums that had students scratching their heads. The essay topics ranged from rating the importance of taking risks in life to dealing with the success of those who have less potential than us. Students were expected to produce a well-thought-out and evidenced essay without any grammatical errors.
XAT 2023 - moderately tough
Overall, the XAT 2023 was designed to be moderately complex, said students, where they battled trickier questions in sections like decision-making but solved enough easy problems to keep going without losing spirit. Addressing the fear and intimidation that has been created around XAT, Exam Convenor, Prof Vishwa Ballabh from XLRI said, “We want XAT candidates to challenge themselves to perform better than in the past and not shy away from difficulties, isn’t that the essence of management?”
XAT 2023 was conducted in a computer-based mode in over 80 Indian cities. In addition to XLRI and XAMI Institutes, over 160 other B-schools nationwide recognise XAT exam scores. This year, the number of registrants for XAT went up by 25% this year with 98,242 business school aspirants signing up for the exam, of which 64% were males and 36% were females. Other large business school exams like CAT saw a rise in registrants by 11% too.
