SAIL Management Trainee 2009 paper

Hello aspiring SAIL management trainees(Computer Engineering). I recently appeared for this exam on 19th July 2009 and wow what an experience that was. This exam definitely stands out as one of the worst paper set in the history of competitive examinations. Well, to begin with as you all know SAIL does not subscribe any syllabus for this exam . It just says there will be folllowing 2 sections:

1. The first section consists of 100 technical questions from your engineering expertise. The time allotted is 1 hour.

2. The second section consists of 4 separate sections. The time allotted is 1hour 30 minutes.

i)General Awareness (35 Questions)

ii)English (35 Questions)

iii)Quatitative Aptitude (35 Questions)

iv)Reasoning Aptitude (45 Questions)

Now to begin with expect a lot of printing mistakes in the paper. There can be exactly similar options in the same question. May be none of the option will be correct. But, what i liked the most was in an english comprehension. The passage talked about physicists and psychologists and they asked a question that quoted a line from the passage which by the way was not present in the passage. Funny as this may sound the question talked about philosophers. God knows how that question made its way into the paper.

Now let me tell you about the technical paper. This was a very different kind of computer engineering paper that came my way. When i first saw the questions i thought may be i got a wrong set. This was definitely not a computer engineering technical paper. The kind of questions were:

1. Initial 4-5 questions talked about mean, median, mode, variance, covariance (Well try to remember these were the things you dealt with in statistics).

2. As i further reviewed the paper i saw questions fron Automata and Compilers. Well the standard of questions asked was pretty good and you need to be thorough in these if you want to clear the cut off in this section as these questions formed a large part of this section.

3. Next were questions based on Digital Circuits. There were all sort of questions on logic gates, conversions from one base system to another etc. This also formed a large chunk of the section.

4. Well there were some questions on output, networking and other basic computer science but, they were really just a walk-through.

After this exhausting section you are asked to start the next section.

1. This begins with GK. This was a comparatively easy section.

i)Ther were questions about indian parliament like who presides over the joint meeting of lok sabha and rajya sabha, who elects the vice president, about the council of ministers and so on.

ii). Questions were asked on indian history like who was the ruler when Alexander invaded India, who designed the national flag and so on.

iii). Some basic GK was asked like who wrote the Panchatantra, which is the oldest veda, which is the land locked country etc. Read some basic GK and you can deal with these questions.

2. The english section has 2 simple comprehensions, synonyms, antonyms, anlogies, sentence completion, fill in the blanks, word usage etc. This wont consume much of your energy.

3. The Quant section is easy but lengthy so try to distribute a little more time to this part.

Questions were asked on coordinate geometry, trigonometry, upstream downstream, work etc.

4. The Reasoning section is easy. There were 10 diagrammatic questions which were very easy, series questions, odd one out etc.

To clear this exam one needs to clear cutoff in all the sections. So remember to distribute your time efficiently.