XAT Study Plan – Decision Making Preparation in Three Weeks

Tuesday, December 19th, 2017

XAT exam is nearly three weeks away. There isn’t much time left so I thought it would be a good idea to come up with a last minute study plan for the most important section in the XAT exam – Decision Making. The reason why I am calling it the most important section is pretty straight forward:

1. It is easy and high scoring.
2. A lot of students don’t really prepare for it so it is easy to get a high percentile in it or clear the cutoff – whatever your goal
3. It does not take too much time to prepare
4. Roughly 1/4^th to 1/3^rd of the XAT 2018 exam paper is going to be based on Decision Making.

What all to cover in XAT Decision Making in three weeks?

Concept Building

It is important to cover the basic concepts that are involved in the Decision Making section of XAT 2018.  The questions are broadly divided into 4 categories

• Ethical Dilemma
• Managerial Issues
• Pure Logic
• Financial Issues

If you look at the previous year papers of XAT, you would find that the Decision Making questions were split into these 4 categories in the following way:

As a part of your preparation, it is important that you build your basic concepts well so that you can identify which category a question belongs to. Some of the rules that you can follow while solving Decision Making questions are as follows:

• What would Batman do?
• Humanity is superior to everything else
• Employer’s goals (image driven and long term)
• Ignorance of law is no excuse

It would be wise to spend some time reading these blogposts to build your concepts for Decision Making.

Steps to Solve Ethical Dilemma Questions

Use Analytical Reasoning to solve  Decision Making questions

Identifying Stakeholders to asses the impact

If you are enrolled in our online XAT Decision Making course, please go through the first couple of sections. Covering the concepts, going through the reading material should be the first step in your study plan for Decision Making in the last 3 weeks.

Previous Year XAT Papers

Past year XAT papers are a great resource to prepare for Decision Making. As a matter of fact, I believe they are the best. Decision Making started appearing prominently in the XAT exam from 2008. That gives you a decade of papers to go through. Those have some really good quality questions that will teach you where you stand and a few things could be better than that. We have compiled the past year XAT papers of Decision Making and given it for download as well.

This would give you a database of approximately 150 questions to help you prepare Decision Making for XAT.  As a part of our online XAT Decision Making course we have video solutions for all these questions. The idea is, that as a XAT aspirant, it is not just the answer that matters but you also need to understand the method and the process that was followed to derive the answer.

Going through the previous year XAT papers would probably be the most time consuming part of your study plan for Decision Making.

Test Yourself with New Questions for Decision Making

It is also important to test yourself new questions / new data as to how much you have learnt about Decision Making. The best possible way to do that is with sectional and full-length mock tests. As a part of our online course for XAT Decision Making, we provide the following:

1. 5 sectional mock tests for Decision Making
2. 5 full length mock tests for XAT 2018 exam

The 5 sectional mock tests have 20 questions each. All these questions come with detailed solutions so that students are able to understand the logic behind the given answers. Same is valid for the 5 full length mock tests for XAT 2018 exam.

All questions, and not just the Decision Making ones, come with detailed solutions as well. A combination of these two provides a XAT aspirant with 200+ unique and new questions on Decision Making to test himself.

You can check out a mock test on Decision Making to understand the kind of questions that we have as a part of our online course for XAT Decision Making. It is important to have these tests as a part of your XAT study plan so that you know where you stand and what you can do to improve.

3 Week Study Plan for XAT Decision Making

Week 1

Go through all the Decision Making concept videos in the course.

Go through all the reading material that is shared on the blog

Attempt previous year papers from 2008 to 2012 and watch the video solutions

Attempt 1 sectional mock test

Attempt 1 full-length mock test and analyze it

Week 2

Attempt previous year papers from 2013 to 2015 and watch the video solutions

Attempt 2 sectional mock tests

Attempt 2 full-length mock tests

Week 3

Attempt previous year papers from 2016 to 2017 and watch the video solutions

Attempt 2 sectional mock tests

Attempt 2 full-length mock tests

Other posts related to Decision Making

Target XAT 2018 – Strategies to attempt Decision Making Section
XAT Decision Making Free Mock Test with 20 New Practice Questions
XAT Decision Making Section – Golden Principles for tackling questions related to Management Issues
Making sense of the XAT Decision Making Ability section

I hope with this XAT Study Plan you will find success in the Decision Making section. Let me add, it is easy to plan but it is hard to execute it. You should focus on the execution part of things.

Best of luck!