XAT 2025 was conducted by XLRI Jamshedpur for admission to their Business Management and Human Resource Management programmes on 5^th Jan 2025 as a computer-based test.

Structure of the Exam

The test had major changes compared to XAT 24.

• Essay writing section was dropped
• General Awareness has fewer questions - 20 compared to 25 in XAT 24
• The duration of the exam was reduced to 180 minutes from 205 minutes
• Onscreen Calculator was made available

The exam, with two parts (I and II) had a total number of 75 and 20 questions this year in Part-I and Part-II respectively.

Part-I comprised three sections:

1. Quantitative Aptitude and Data Interpretation
2. Decision-Making
3. Verbal and Logical Reasoning

Part-II contained the section on General Knowledge

The duration of the test was 170 minutes for the first part and 10 minutes for the second.

All questions carried equal marks with negative marking of 0.25 for a wrong answer. There was a negative marking of 0.1 for un-attempted questions in Part I, for such questions that are over and above eight

The section on General Knowledge, did not have any negative marking and the marks scored in this section would be used for evaluation only after the initial screening i.e., these will not be used for the shortlisting of candidates for the GWPI phase.

The break-up of the questions across sections is as below.

Part I (Three sections)

• Verbal and Logical Reasoning : 26 Qs
• Decision-Making : 21 Qs
• Quantitative Aptitude and Data Interpretation : 28 Qs

Part II - General Knowledge : 20 Qs

Part 1: Section 1

Quantitative Aptitude and Data Interpretation

This section had a combination of QA questions and DI sets, as the name indicated. Most of the questions are from the easy and moderate levels of difficulty.

The distribution of questions across areas of QA was as below.

The number of QA questions increased to 16 questions from 15 questions last year. Overall, the paper was similar to the last year in terms of difficulty and distribution across various topics. Topics like Time-speed-distance, Progressions which were present last year were missing this year. This year Geometry has made a strong comeback in terms of the number of questions. DI sets too involved good amount of quant concepts like geometric progression, similarity of triangles etc.

DI had four sets of three questions each. Unlike last year, all the sets were of three questions each. Also, the sets were not very straight-forward resulting in lot of time spent. The details of the sets are listed in the table below

As the difficulty level is the same with no change in the overall number of questions, the cut-offs are expected to be similar to those of last year in this section.

Part 1: Section 2

Decision Making

There were 21 questions in this section, which is the same as last year. They were from seven sets with each set having 3 questions. The breakup of the sets is as below.

The questions in many cases were pretty long and required careful elimination as more than one option appeared as possible action. While some options could be eliminated easily as they were either irrelevant to the context or are outright wrong, the others were very close and needed careful thinking.

It can be said, overall, that this section remained true to its nature, justifying the longish and close to 3-hour time limit for the paper.

Part 1: Section 3

Verbal Ability & Logical Reasoning

The Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning section had 26 questions. Overall, the section was a notch easier than in XAT 2024. There were 15 Reading Comprehension questions, two poem-based comprehension questions, two questions on grammar, two Para formation questions, one vocabulary-based Fill in the Blanks (three blanks) and three Critical Reasoning questions based on short passages. A surprise element was a critical reasoning question based on a cartoon strip!

The VA questions were on the easier side. The vocabulary question only tested very commonly used words, and the grammar questions tested basic grammar and usage. The PFQs had options as usual, and the wrong options were easy to eliminate. A couple of critical reasoning questions had confusing options, but the short passages were not difficult to comprehend. The cartoon-based question may have been a little difficult for many students, since it required interpretation of the message of the cartoon.

There were five RC passages with three questions each, and a poem with two questions. This year, some of the passages had familiar themes - this must have been a relief for most students, since XAT is generally known to select abstract passages. Here is a break-up of the Reading Comprehension passages:

The poem was “You Walk into This Room and” by Sujata Bhatt. It is an abstract poem, and students who are not familiar with interpretation of poetry may have found the 2 questions difficult.

Overall, the Verbal Ability section was of a moderate difficulty level. Given that the student had to manage time allocation among sections (in the absence of sectional time limits), the choice of questions was critical. Students who managed to choose the right passages and questions would have handled the section well.

Part 2: General Knowledge

The GK section had a mix of questions from various areas including Science & Technology, history, geography, sports, business, etc., from both current events and static GK

The split of the questions in this section was as below

This section is not used for shortlisting for the 2^nd phase. It is used during final selection. Hence, there would be no cut-off requirement.

XAT 2025 Cutoffs

The official data announced for last year's XAT was as below

As the paper this year was very similar in difficulty level compared to that of the last year the cut-offs are expected to remain at similar levels. The expected percentage score would be as below at 90 and 95 percentile ranges