Photo Credit: Stuatpillbrow

The delight that Xavier Aptitude Test (XAT) results were declared almost two weeks earlier was short-lived for at least a few hundred candidates who found their results way-off their expectations. Most of these aspirants claimed to have already dashed out protest letters to Xavier Institute of Management (XLRI) in the hope of a reprieve.

Much of the problems seem to have occurred in the Quant section of the XAT exam which was held on January 6, 2013.

PaGaLGuY spoke to some of the disgruntled candidates. Sai Krishna Routhu says that he and more than 20 of his friends think there is a problem with the Quant key of the XAT-2013 paper. “Each of us have got around 6-7 marks less than expected. We checked keys of all coaching institutes as well,” clarified Sai.

For this young man, it was his dream to get into XLRI. “I was very confident of getting calls for both HR and BM. I was shocked to see my result. I got just 5.5 marks in Quant. I initially thought I could have possibly made a mistake while filling in the OMR sheet but with the increasing number of people who are raising the same point as mine, I am confident there is some error.”

Prashant Mishra’s contention is that there is a substantial discrepancy in his expected and final Quant performance due to which he has missed an XLRI call. “The difference is to the tune of 6 marks in my set C. Even the evaluation of different coaching institutes gave exactly same marks to me, and I have attempted very few questions in that section so no chance of negative marking,” said Prashant.

This candidate is worse-off since he had pinned all his hopes on this exam. “This seemed to be my only call this year and after scoring 98.72 in VA and 84 in DM, I think I was close to a PMIR call at least. But 2 marks and 38 percentile in QA killed all my hopes.”

Ayachi Kashyap is sure that QA marks have been wrongly calculated in XAT-2013 results. “My score is much lesser than the minimum I could have scored. This is after ignoring all the debatable questions and considering only the sure shot ones.”

Mukund Kabra, another XAT aspirant says that the number of candidates who are having problems with their XAT scores run into hundreds. Mukund is quick to add that the concern is genuine because none of the candidates have issues or complaints regarding the Verbal Ability and Decision Making, but only with Quantitative Ability.

“Since the question paper was given to us, almost all of us had discussed the solutions with our mentors, seniors and teachers, hence were quite prepared to see the results that we had somewhat anticipated. Even if we go by the trends, all of us are quite sure of the performance we had put up in the Quant section and it was the Verbal and Decision Making section, whose answers could have been among the debatable ones,” Mukund explained.

Mukund and his friends have hope that their grievances will be addressed since XAT is not a government exam and re-checking and re-evaluation can be allowed. Mukund has worked on an estimate taking a check on the number of candidates he thinks have issues with their XAT scores. His math is:

Total= 100000

Set A and Set Do =50000

Questions which have been wrongly evaluated by = 6-8

Since they were moderate level difficult atleast half of 50000 would have attempted =25000

Half of them would have attempted correctly =12500

“Now 6800 students getting affected by this thing. Thats definitely not a small number,” concludes Mukund adding that even if his analysis is scaled down by half, it is still a huge number.

All candidates acknowledge that XAT is by far one of the toughest exams and the most professionally conducted.

XLRI response

Prof Vishwa Ballabh, Head of Admissions at XLRI said that he has till date only received 2-3 complaints from those wo took XAT 2013. “And we have checked those complaints. There is no issue with the evaluation. I have replied to one of the complainants who happens to be a woman candidate. The other complaint which came to me was a general one so I did not respond to that one.”

Prof Ballabh added that he set up a three member committe after coming to know of complaints to look into them and he personally looked at them as well. “There is no fault from our side. Candidates have made mistakes in the papers,” he said.