Jamshedpur, Jan. 6: Several students had a tough time as they appeared for the XLRI Admission Test (XAT) held this morning as the question paper turned out to be different from what they expected.

“This year the questions were a bit tough as there were too few questions on mathematics which otherwise is a very important part of any such examination,” said Gurpreet Bhatia, the director of Edge — a city-based MBA coaching institute.

Around 1,500 students appeared for the test in two centres in the city — Loyola School and Sacred Heart Convent. In Ranchi about 4,000 students appeared for the tests in four centres. Jamshedpur and Ranchi were the only two cities in the state where XAT was conducted.

Spread over about two and a half hours, there were three sections comprising 120 questions in the test this year. The questions were on topics data interpretation, analytical ability, maths and decision-making. XAT is also the only MBA entrance examination where students are entitled to write an essay of 20 marks. This year’s topic was “Consequences of Gender Imbalance, Third World War.”

XAT is conducted in 91 centres across 31 cities in India and is considered one of the toughest B-school entrance examinations in India.

A total of 90,000 students appeared for the test from the entire country. XAT scores are accepted by over four management schools across India. “Till last year only 39 institutes accepted XAT scores, but this year we have around 46 institutes accepting our scores,” said S.C. Dey, the chairperson (admissions), XLRI.

“Not only were there too many lengthy questions, but most of them were very confusing. Unlike other years, this time they stressed more on decision making and data analysis and most of us were not prepared for it. The mathematics section only had a few questions, which made it extremely difficult to answer the complete the paper on time,” said Ashish Chaudhary, a student who appeared for the test today.

For the first time, students were allowed to bring back the question sheet this year. This is, however, the last year that this B-school entrance test is being conducted only in India.

Come 2009, the same examination would be held in six other South East Asian countries along with India. XAT scores would also be accepted by the Asian Institute of Management in Manila, Philippines and other institutes in places like Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Korea.