The immediate Sunday post CAT, and IIFT kept the spirit of surprise alive! It is complete departure from the trend of management entrance exam papers, which is evident from the salient features mentioned below.

Salient features:

1. Reduction in no of section from 5 to 4
2. Reduction in no of options from 5 to 4
3. Reduction in no of Questions from 185 to 106
4. 27 Qs with only one correct option and negative marks 1/3
5. 79 Qs with more than one correct options and no negative marks
6. Variation in weightage as compared to the previous year
7. For the first time IIFT mentioned about Sectional cut offs
8. Again a first time for IIFT, aspirants were allowed to retain the booklet

CL students had an earlier brush with Multiple Correct Answer Choices in Career Launcher’s MOCK CAT 4. They must have been slightly more comfortable with the format.

Here is an overview of how you should have attempted this paper.

Verbal Ability Section
Part 1: English Usage

This section comprised of questions to test vocabulary and English grammar. The level of difficulty of the questions ranged from average to medium. Most of the questions were time consuming and the orientation towards vocabulary was evident enough. In this section the spectre of negative mark need not haunt you because only 4 questions carried negative marks. So, one could have gone ahead at top speed to optimize the score.

Part I1: Reading Comprehension
RCs were pretty long but simple, and to answer the questions one could have just scanned the passages. Rather, it was sort of a fact finding mission. In RC, there were no questions as such in the ‘traditional sense’, but one had to just find the correct or incorrect statements. One innovation was the questions based on matching, list 1 items with list 2 items.

The composition of the section is as given below:

General Awareness Section

Lo and behold, the is the ultimate show-stopper. One would be tempted to say that aspirants required to be jack of all trade and master of all!
You need to have very good knowledge of Science, Geography, History, Political science, current affairs and Business Awareness to crack the paper. Even an attempt of 8+ would have been great.

Level was difficult, may be difficult is an understatement.

The composition of the section is as given below:

Quantitative Ability Section

After the CAT experience of getting a rather flat QA section, this paper must have been a great shock to the aspirants. The questions ranged from basic arithmetic to some topics related to Vectors (1), Trigonometry (5) and Domain definition of functions (1). Though most of the trigonometry questions could have been solved by just putting values, but it surely gave a tremendous amount of discomfort at the first glance. The overall level of difficulty of this section was moderate to difficult. Lions share (28.5%) of the paper in terms of relative weight is towards this section only.

The composition of the section is as given below:

Data Interpretation Section

In the first glance itself, this part was very tough and involved lengthy tedious calculations. Heavy amount of data is being given and options were more like statements to be verified.

DI and reasoning section was a mix of tough and difficult questions. None of the sets were simple. Cut off in any case should not cross 6-7. Multiple answers made the life of the aspirants more difficult, since they had to go through all the choices. Data Driven DI was very heavy in calculation, even Reasoning based questions ideally should have been left. One set of AR could have been attempted even it was very confusing.             
                                                                                                                   
The composition of the section is as given below: