SNAP successfully completed on 20
th December. There were many versions of the paper (booklet series) where the question order was jumbled up. There were reports of students getting up to set ‘H’ (implying there were at least 8 versions of the paper). This year also, Symbiosis did not give the paper home. Wrongly so, some of the top institutes are focusing more on not letting the misprints/errors come out in public rather than focus on having a paper without such issues. There were a couple of issues with questions in quant this year too but we will get to that later.
Highlights of SNAP 2015
- The paper this year was relatively more difficulty compared to SNAP 2014. Though the Quant section was at similar difficulty level to last year, the General English, Logic and GK sections turned out to be score dampeners.
- One Quant question from numbers did not have the correct answer option whereas one question from profit and loss needed the students to assume certain information to arrive at the answer option given (as per students)
- The GK had a mix of static and current affair questions. Some of them were from events that had little or no coverage anywhere in the media making this section difficult even for students who follow events on a regular basis
- The focus on DI and RC was minimal. The Quant section had one set of 5 questions from DI and the English section had one RC with 5 questions.
SNAP 2015 Paper Pattern
| Duration of the paper |
120 min |
| No of Questions |
150 |
| No of Sections |
4 |
| Marking pattern |
1 markers and 2 markers (Analytical) |
| Negative marking |
1/4th of the allotted mark |
| Total Marks allotted |
180 |
| S.no |
Sections |
Total Marks |
No of Questions |
| 1 |
General English |
40 |
40 |
| 2 |
Quantitative Ability |
40 |
40 |
| 3 |
General Awareness: General Knowledge, Current Affairs, Business Scenario |
40 |
40 |
| 4 |
Analytical & Logical Reasoning |
60 |
30 |
| |
Total |
180 |
150 |
SNAP 2015 Analysis & Cutoffs
120 minutes and 150 questions appears a difficult task for students in general. However if you realize that the paper is difficult and allocate the time judiciously in various sections, you will be able to pick up the easy questions from all the sections (barring GK where there was no such luck!); for there were sitters in all the sections to be picked up. The key is to ensure that you read all the questions so that you don’t miss the easy ones.
The ideal time break-up should have been as below with the number of attempts that a good student should have made to ensure a call from the top Symbiosis Institutes
| S.no |
Sections |
Expected time for the section in minutes |
Expected number of attempts |
Expected Marks |
| 1 |
General English |
23 – 25 |
28 - 32 |
20 – 22 |
| 2 |
Quantitative Ability |
35 – 40 |
23 - 25 |
18 – 22 |
| 3 |
General Awareness: General Knowledge, Current Affairs, Business Scenario |
8 -10 |
8 - 10 |
3 - 4 |
| 4 |
Analytical & Logical Reasoning |
42 – 45 |
20 - 22 |
30 – 32 |
| |
Total |
120 |
64 – 73 |
71 – 80 |
General English
The English was heavily focused on the verbal part with only one RC with 5 questions coming in this section. There were a number of questions based on idioms and phrases, synonyms, antonyms. Grammar (identification of wrong part of sentence), odd word out, English usage, fill in the blanks, analogies made up the rest of the paper. The para jumble type of questions and spelling correction were completely missing.
One thing that was noticeable was that similar type of questions were not bunched together. For example, there were fill in the blanks, antonyms, synonyms, idioms and phrases sprinkled all over the paper at random.
The section should not have taken a long time for the students because of the number of verbal questions. The student either know the answer or not and no amount of pondering would help him/her during the exam on unfamiliar words. The decision to answer was made easier given the difficulty level of the paper.
The one RC passage was of about 1000 words followed by 5 questions. The difficulty level varied between easy to average. The below link gives the reference to the passage -
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/knowlegANDwis.htm. A good student could have got 4 correct.
The fill in the blank questions did not have too much of variation in terms of the nature of the questions.
There were 5 questions from Grammar where the student needed to identify the wrong part of the given sentence.
This section was difficult on the whole and a decent score would be around 20-23!
Quantitative Aptitude
The Quant section once again (as expected and as VistaMind had been predicting throughout) was heavily tilted towards Arithmetic. Very few questions were given from Algebra. The section included one set of DI with 5 questions that were easy to calculate. On the whole, this section was very similar to the SNAP 2014 quant section.
There were about 20-21 easy questions, 16 medium level and 3 hard questions. A good student could easily have attempted around 28-30 in about 40 minutes. Those who were good in quant should have spent more time here to maximize their scores.
......
One question (number of zeroes in 1024!) definitely did not have the right answer option. The correct answer is 253 whereas the closest answer in the options was 252.
Another question from profit and loss did not have complete information. It was given that a vendor cheats and gains 5% by selling his goods. What is the quantity he sells per 1 kg? Here, unless the assumption is made that the selling price is at cost price, the question cannot be solved.
......
The breakup of the questions was as follows –
Arithmetic: Percentages, Profit and loss (4); Averages and mixtures (2); Time & Distance (2); Simple Interest – Compound Interest (2); Equations (1); Time & Work (1);
Algebra: Progressions (2); Number theory (4); Logarithms (2); Surds (2);
Pure Math: P&C (1); Probability (3);
Geometry (4); Venn diagrams (2); Miscellaneous (3);
Data Interpretation : 5
Analytical and Logical Reasoning
This section had 30 questions with each question carrying 2 marks. There were a number of questions from number series, coding decoding, and blood relations. Seating arrangements, selections, analogies, and visual analogies made up the rest of the questions
There were 2 sets (4 on selections and 5 on seating arrangements) and few independent questions that were easily doable.
As mentioned earlier in this article, this section was difficult compared to SNAP 2014.
A good student would have attempted around 20 questions by picking up the easier ones. Any score above 30 out of 60 would be good in this section!
General Awareness
This section had a mix of static as well as current affairs questions. Some of the questions were from issues that hardly had any media coverage making the paper very difficult even for students who are on top of daily news.
The answer choices also were very close in terms of dates or numbers making general guessing also very difficult. (For example, there was a question on the number of seats NDA won in 2014 Lok Sabha elections out of the total seats gone for polling. The answer options were something like 336-545, 334-543, 334-545, 335-543)
Spending anything more than 10 minutes in this section would be bad since these are memory based questions. Given the cutoff in IIFT (which was just 0.82) the expectation from this section will be close to nothing. 5+ marks would be considered very good!
| Institute |
Expected cutoff mark |
| SIBM Pune |
74 - 76 |
| SCMHRD |
73 - 75 |
| SIIB |
65 – 67 |
| SIBM Bangalore |
64 – 66 |
| SITM/SIOM |
55 - 56 /45 - 46 |
CAT 2015 –
Slot 1,
Slot 2
NMAT 2015
IIFT 2015