Decision Making for XAT 2014

XAT, as "they" say, is one of the tougher management entrance exams. I would rather disagree with the "tough" part. Gone are those days. There are many of us who cracked this test, and believe me, not many would classify it as insanely difficult.
The exam is characterised mainly by the Decision Making section. After getting a lot of requests regarding how to tackle this area in the exam, I decided to pen down my thoughts about this.
To generally be able to ace this section, you need to develop a basic understanding of how the businesses and life in general works. Whatever decisions we take in life are meant to satisfy as many stakeholders as possible. Same goes for DM caselets too. You need to make sure that whatever decision you take is ethically and morally correct as also favourable for as many parties as possible.
This sense of taking the right decision, as we know, comes through practice. From my experience of preparing for XAT, the material provided by the coaching institutes currently is, frankly, not very enlightening. One needs a concrete source of preparation for DM because generally this is where most of the toppers get differentiated.
There was an extreme dearth of study material when I was preparing. My only preparation for DM, in fact, was solving the old XAT question papers and making my own assumptions, which you would realize is a very haphazard method.

So how exactly do we tackle this problem? The answer to this lies in the word “process”. To make sure that we are not on the wrong path while solving the questions in the DM section, we have to go step by step. The first step would inadvertently be clearing your mind of biases and favoritisms. We have quite a few preconceived notions in our mind which might make it difficult for us to think straight. So let go of such inhibitions and make sure that you are using only the data given in the question to solve it. No more no less. The second step would be to put yourself in the shoes of the person making the decision. It might be the CEO, the Sales Head or the HR head of the company. Then take a look at and consider which all stakeholders might be affected by taking the decision. Then among the options choose the decision which satisfies the earlier criteria mentioned, i.e. an ethical decision taking care of as many stakeholders as possible.

Now when you are in the exam hall, you are not going to do this so slow. You have to respect the time and make sure that you get the most out of this section. And that is where your practice comes in. If you have solved a number of DM questions beforehand, you already have a feel of what’s in store when a particular question is asked. The best source to practice is undoubtedly the previous XAT papers. You can easily find the papers and answer keys on the internet and solving them will give you a definite edge while attempting the questions in the exam. A very important thing to consider while solving these is to make sure that if you get an answer wrong, rather than just looking the correct answer, you go through the process of making the decision as described in the key. Reason it out to yourself regarding why you got the question wrong and what you could have done to avoid it.

All this and you will be pretty much good to go!!

If you have any queries, please post in the comments. We here would be more than happy to answer them.