XAT 2010 will be conducted on 3rd of January, 2010. Timing of this post might look a bit odd given that only 4 days left before the exam. However, in my view, this can be the most opportune time to do a post on how two exams are different. With four days to go you can still fine tune your strategy and you can use previous year XAT papers as Mock papers for your XAT 2010 preparation.

Marking

XAT 2010 is the only entrance exam which employs progressive negative marking. So, guess work is a strictly avoidable. Accuracy is much more important in XAT then any other exam conducted in this country. You don’t want to loose half a mark for every wrong answer by indulging yourself in guess work.

Pattern

XAT 2008 had 120 questions to be attempted in 120 minutes and XAT 2009 had 104 questions in all. The paper was followed by a 10 minute break and then an essay for which 20 minutes were given. One important thing with XAT in last two exams has been that, there are three sections only, Quant & DI as one section, Analytical Reasoning and verbal ability. Since, Quant and DI are one section, you can easily make sure that you focus on either of the two as per your strength and convenience. Just make sure that, you don’t miss out on the sitters that may be there in either of the two. Higher mathematics is covered in XAT, but you can skip it.

XAT Essay

XAT has always had an essay . Though, there is not much time left to hone up either your writing skills or Current affair awareness, you can still make sure that you update yourself with what was hot in the year gone by. This is year end, So most of the blogs, websites, news channels will be doing the year that was and 2010 predictions or 2010 trends kind of shows. They can be a good source of revision. FYI, XAT 2009 essay topic was  “The Inherent vice of Capitalism is unequal sharing of blessings and the inherent virtue of Socialism is equal sharing of misery.”