On February 2 around 9.30 am, around 280 candidates who had applied for the Business Management Programme and around 350 candidates who had applied to the Human Resources Management got their XLRI Jamshedpur interview shortlist statuses reversed and the ‘Regret’ message was replaced by a ‘Congratulations’.

When XLRI declared its initial interview shortlist on January 25, some XAT test-takers who had cleared the cutoffs were not sent interview calls. This led to instant resentment and a volley of discussions took place. The clarification put up on the XLRI website which asked qualifying candidates without calls to contact the admissions office and a further update that the cutoffs wouldn’t change, calmed a few nerves. But still, it remained to be seen whether everyone would get an interview call or not.

The notice on the XLRI website has been now modified and the new bit of information is,

XAT 2011 had three sections `Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning (VA), `Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation (QA) and `Analytical Reasoning and Decision Making Ability (AR).

For Human Resource Management Programme around, 1,000 applicants having more than 85 percentile in VA, 70 percentile in QA, 75 percentile in AR, and overall 91 percentile have been shortlisted for the Group Discussion and Personal Interview.

For Business Management Programme, around 830 applicants having more than 70 percentile in VA, 90 percentile in QA, 80 percentile in AR, and overall 92 percentile have been shortlisted for Personal Interview.

The cut-offs, as they had mentioned in their clarification on 27^th of January have been kept the same and additional number of calls have been given to those who had fulfilled the criteria and had applied to XLRI.

However, questions remained. Did XLRI decide to call additional people after they realised that a few hadn’t got calls or was it decided to maintain a ratio of 1:8.33 for PMIR and around 1:7 for BM? Also, were only those who had mailed the admissions office got the call or was everyone who qualified revisited?

Despite the revised list, a few candidates who had cleared the cutoffs still hadn’t got a call. We talked to Dr Soumendra N Bagchi, Associate Professor at XLRI about this. Here is what he told us,

XAT has always been different. This has been reflected in the use of business decision related case-lets, which was introduced in XAT before any other examination in the country. Essay writing was a part of the effort to have a holistic evaluation of a candidate’s abilities. This year it has been replaced by an analytical question. Both these features have been adopted by other examinations later on.

This year XLRI’s admission process has been further revamped to ensure diversity of candidates and have people who possess critical thinking ability. This has been reflected in replacement of essay by the analytical question. To further that and without making any concession to students of a particular background like awarding extra points to non-engineers, cut-offs have been lowered, which necessarily implied that XLRI was targeting a larger candidate pool. This ensures that XLRI gets a better candidate pool, without any victimisation/ bias towards any candidate because of his/her background.

The problems that were faced by candidates in the XLRI’s shortlist were due to a technical glitch. That has been rectified. Therefore all candidates who were eligible and had applied to XLRI, have been shortlisted. This is irrespective of the fact whether they had emailed/faxed their problem or not. The email/fax data is being used to cross-check the short-list, and that process is still on. However to prevent any anxiety on behalf of the candidates we have released the list after the first round of verification. That is why the notice informing candidates, who have still missed out regarding the short-lists, asking them to contact XLRI, is still on in the result page of XLRI’s site. So far till evening, we have received only two cases where candidates have been missed out, and those issues have been resolved.

Also, the second round of verification was done and the list was updated at around 10.30 in the morning today.

Candidates who haven’t got the call yet in spite of fulfilling the criteria can get in touch with the XLRI admissions office so as to get their queries cleared at the earliest.