Traps at MBA entrance tests: Learn how to dodge them
A management entrance test is designed so as to bring out the ability of an aspirant to perform under immense pressure. To subject the students to a bit of stress so as to observe how good they are at handling it, is one of the main objectives of any entrance test. In order to ensure this, the test designers set a few traps in the papers which, an under-prepared aspirant (or sometimes even a well prepared aspirant) can fall into. Elaborate on a few of those traps here:
Well begun is half done
Visualize this. You have started your test. The first question is a scorcher. You cannot do anything but just scribble the same bit of information which is given. After fighting it out for 2-3 minutes you finally give up. Question two, the same thing again. About 10 minutes into the test and you aren't going anywhere.
You might have been through this a number of times. One of the commonest traps set in any paper. The first DI set, the first RC passage, the first few Quant questions are sometimes, the most difficult compared to the rest of the paper. Reasons are two:
- It makes you panic as it eats into your time and,
- It somehow makes you believe that the paper is indeed difficult thus making you score a bit less than what you would.
The best thing would be to get rid of such questions as soon as possible and go to the next one. It is always a great feeling to nail that first question which helps soothing your nerves to a large extent.
The converse of this is also true many a time. The final few questions will be the easiest ones. It is just to make sure that a 'prepared' aspirant goes through all of them and scores to his best ability without getting stuck anywhere.
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Plenty of information. Pretty much useless. You read and read and read some more. End of the day, a simple question awaits. You rue wasting so much of your precious time. The motive is the same old time wasting tactic.
People who took the FMS test last year might recollect the huge RC that was offered. People who have the habit of reading the entire thing first and then answering the questions would have ended up wasting a lot of time. Few questions in DI, have much more info than what is required to solve the questions. An RC might seem to be highly philosophical but could have some sitters for questions. Just looking at the main question and leaving the sub-questions after being disappointed, is one of the frequently used traps.
To get through, one can take a look at the questions first so as to know which part of the information to focus on and then go about reading/skimming through the data and go slow at the relevant portions.
Not to call a spade a spade
Now this has a few variations. They will say that there is a rectangle or a rhombus or a parallelogram. Then there will be a generalised question with some options in variables. One can always assume it to be a square and do it quickly. Similarly with triangles. One can assume it to be an equilateral triangle and get over with it. Similarly with the questions where a series is given, if one cannot solve it completely, one can always put in a few values which satisfy the conditions and check with the options if there is some pattern.
'Its' a bad thing to 'loose'
Notice the errors? These are few of the most common errors in English. In fact there are few questions designed so as to make people pay for the wrong habits. In this case a simple spelling mistake you have not bothered to correct for so long that you can almost challenge anyone that whatever you are saying is right.
Right ya wrong
Under pressure in a moment of madness, one tends to overlook what is asked. The instructions for a question are designed so as to confuse even the most vigilant of the aspirants. You can see an instruction which reads as "Following is a group of sentences amongst which some are not grammatically correct. Identify the sentence(s) which are incorrect in terms of English, usage and grammar. Then choose the most appropriate option." Now, the trouble starts when you get confused between 'incorrect' and 'appropriate.' You must have faced this a lot of times, when instead of picking the incorrect sentences, you end up selecting the correct sentences and because you get an option (obviously a trap), you mark it and forget about it.
The other variations of this trap are found in RC passages and sometimes in DI caselets when a test-taker gets confused between, say the number of wins and the number of matches not lost (which effectively means the number of matches won plus the number of matches drawn).
Shock value
This involves catching a test-taker unaware. There might be some new type of question, a simple logic which is twisted in a such a way so as to give it the 'look' of an entirely new type of question. Or say, maybe a new type of question altogether. Or maybe the pattern won't be revealed till the time you get the booklet. Maybe there will be progressive negative marking. If you notice in last year's XAT, the negative marking was -0.2 for the first five incorrect answers and -0.25 thenceforth. What seems to be a 'harsh' negative marking scheme is actually better than other entrance exams wherein you get a straight -0.25 for every incorrect answer.
The point here is to throw an aspirant off his premeditated strategy and make him panic. At the end of the day, the basics remain the same - "attempt what you know correctly, leave what you don't and start preparing for the next stage."
The art of misdirection
Sometimes, there is information which seems unnecessary, which often 'seems' to contradict the first few statements. This is mainly to misdirect you. More or less similar to a magic show where the magician makes you believe that the trick is what you are looking at but actually it is something else. This is because you are made to think that a particular piece of information is important when in reality isn't. There was a question in one of the mocks in which one of the statements said that 'X was satisfied with the money he had won.' This is designed to make you believe that actually X is the winner though it was nowhere mentioned. This can be one of the seemingly 'wrong' questions. The above statement was just put there to introduce the character X i.e. just to say that the one person about whom nothing has been said is X.
Another variant is commonly seen in the RC passages where, the question asked about what the author does not state in this passage and all the option sentences are present in the passage. The right answer in this case will most often than not have someone else's quote and so not necessarily what the author says. A simpler variant of the same will be when one of the statements is slightly altered (not entirely wrong but not entirely right either).
These are just few of the traps which test-designers commonly set in the entrance tests. If you know of any more of them, do tell us in the comments section.
