IIFT

The VA-RC section was divided into two subsections, with 16 RC questions (of 1 mark each) in the first subsection and 20 VA questions (of 0.75 marks each) in the second subsection). Just like last year, the RC questions were simple and very easy to do. The majority of the RC questions were direct, with very few inferential questions; and even the inferential questions would not have posed much problem. There were four passages with 4 questions each; two of the passages were somewhat lengthy (around 1.5 pages long each), but the other two were less than a page each. All the passages were fairly easy to read and understand.

The VA subsection was a little more challenging, as it featured a number of new question types, such as a crossword and etymology of a word. Nearly all the questions were vocabulary based, apart from 2 jumbled sentence questions (also a new question type for IIFT, but easy to do). The Fill in the Blanks questions required you to know certain idiomatic/colloquial expressions that not everyone would have been familiar with. Apart from the difficulty of the words themselves, several of the questions were time consuming, as they involved consulting long lists and tables of words.

In about 35 minutes, it would have been possible to attempt 8-12 RC questions and 11-13 VA questions. The expected cut-off for this section would be around 8-9 marks.

Reading comprehension

Verbal Ability

There were 25 questions in this section, comprising 13 static and 12 current events questions. Furthermore, out of these 25 questions, 14 were on world affairs and only 11 on national events. This section was a little tougher than the GA section last year. There were a few ‘Match the Column’ questions which were easy because identifying only one correct pair would have given you the answer. However, some current event questions were quite difficult. The themes of the questions were mostly on business, personalities, headquarters and sports, with a couple from science and technology.

On the whole, if you devoted around 10-12 minutes to the GA section, you could have attempted around 13-15 questions. The expected cut-off for this section would be around 1-1.33 marks.

This section was sub-divided into two parts, namely Logical Reasoning and Data Interpretation in that order.

Logical Reasoning

The Logical Reasoning part was characterized by easy to difficult sets as well as easy to medium singleton questions. Out of 22 questions in LR, 2 questions were from Verbal Reasoning while the remaining 20 questions were from Non-Verbal reasoning. Following was the break-up of the Logical Reasoning part:

*: One question in the set had incorrect options. While the correct answer is “Finance”, it was not mentioned in the options. The best was to mark the option which was logically closest i.e. “Finance or Logistics”.
Ideal strategy would have been to solve easy sets and singleton questions before attempting the difficult sets on Arrangements and Family Tree + Arrangement.

Data Interpretation
There were total 4 sets with 5 questions each. As usual, Data Interpretation sets were fairly calculation intensive. Out of the four sets, two sets were on Tables, one set was on a stacked column graph and one set was a multiple bar chart. Following was the break-up of the Data Interpretation part:

Ideally one should have attempted 18-20 questions in about 40 minutes. The expected cut-off for this section is around 6 marks.

This section was dominated by Modern Mathematics (11 questions), followed by Arithmetic and Geometry (3 questions each). There were 2 questions on Algebra and 1 question on Numbers.

Following table shows the break-up of the questions in the Quantitative Analysis section.

Ideally a student whose strength is Mathematics should have attempted 14-15 questions in about 40 minutes. The expected cut-off for this section would be around 4 marks.