Institute of Rural Management was established in 1979 with a vision to provide managerial education to the rural co-operatives. Owing to the uniquenes of the programme IRMA has been conducting its own entrance exam for admissions to its PRM courses. By and large IRMA exam is divided into four sections,
Section I : 50 questions on Quant and Data Interpretation
Section II : 50 Questions to test Logical Reasoning
Section III : 40 Questions on English usage includes RC
Section IV : 60 Questions focusing on Issues of Social Concern ( GK)
The overall difficulty level of the paper is from average to moderately difficult and it carries negative marking.
Following is a brief on what has happened in this paper thus far

Sectionwise DNA of IRMA entrance exam

Quant and DI
If you have decent quant skills and good vedic mathematics skill, then you need not worry about this exam. A hell lot of questions in quant section look like “calculate 234.78712*321.99-91.8768473+bla bla”, of course you are given for choices to chose your answer from. If you have good vedic maths ( read mental maths skill) along with good elimination skills, the battle is half won. Rest of topics are run of the mill work, percentage, Time speed and distance problems. Since DI is also bundled into this section, number of Quant questions get further reduced. So, anybody having a Quant-o-phobia can hope to do well on this one.

Logical Reasoning
This section is a far tougher section than the quant section. Arguments, decision making, cause and effect, definatel false/probably true, assumptions etc are some of the topics that are covered in this section. if you can spot an easy question easily, you shouldn’t be facing much problems with this one as well.

English Usage and Reading Comprehension
This section forms 20% of the IRMA entrance exam. Generally, 4 to 5 Reading comprehension passages feature in this section. These passages carry some kind of social awareness connection. Questions on sentence correction, Parajumbles and fill in the blanks complete this section. The section is again atmost of moderate difficult level.

Issues of Social concern and General Awareness
Probably the most easiest to score but unfortunately the most dreaded section of IRMA paper. Because coming to terms with general awareness is still easy but issues of social concern is something which doesn’t come naturally to us, because as a nation we are socially unconcerend. We would know inflation figures but we would not know the reasons behind it. We would know that there is a nationwide grain shortage but we wouldnt know the absolute numbers of shortage. IRMA’s paper tests just that. What was increase in India’s barley production in XYZ financial year, so on and so forth.

Negative Marking and Sectional Cut-offs
Thank god for negative marking and sectional cut-offs in IRMA paper. Becuase if it hasnt been for these two, nobody would have taken this exam seriously. These two raise the overall difficulty level of this paper. The cut-offs are in percentile terms, so generally, the section on Issues of social concern has lower cut-offs while quant has higher cutoffs.

Who should take this exam, Prep resources, institutes taking this exam in IRMA 2008 Part II.