As you might know already, there’s a passing bar in each section of the IBA admission test. The passing bar depends on the performance of the candidates who sit for the test. So while preparing for IBA, you cannot find an objective answer to questions like “how many questions to answer?” or “how much time to take” or “what to focus on?”....

You have to sit for more and more tests. And you have to intuitively grow from each. A big part of your preparation starts after you press that “submit test” button.

To help you in that prep, there are detailed analytics on this website. I’ve put a hell of a lot of thought and effort into making sure that they're calculated and presented the best way possible. If you understand and utilize them properly, they can significantly improve your IBA prep.

How do you get into IBA? The easy answer, by passing the admission test.
So the most important metric to evaluate yourself is Pass/Fail.
If you passed, you’ve done well. If you failed, you didn’t.

When the deadline of a live test ends, we evaluate all the results and set a passing bar for that test. Generally, around 30-50% of the students pass a test. Because that’s the % of students who are doing things right and have a good shot.

Along with the passing bar, we also publish a leaderboard where you can see the score/ranking of everyone. You can see how many of your friends/batchmates passed, how many failed, and their average score in each section.

The passing bar and leaderboard are only available for live tests that are scheduled for a set date. For practice tests and assessment tests, which can be taken at any time, there’s no passing bar because the test-taking deadline doesn’t end. But no need to worry; there’s feedback for those as well: The median!

Along with the total score, the section-wise score, and the topic-wise score, you can see the median of each. The median is the middle number of all the scores of that test. So it tells you how you are doing compared to the average Joe. Your goal should be to cross the median in total score, in each section, and each topic.

Other than the score, you can see the time you took. You also get the count of the questions you attempted, questions you got correct, questions you got wrong, and questions you skipped. If you just look at the numbers, you can intuitively tell when something is off. Still to further simplify it, we’ve put the Attempt rate and the Accuracy rate with each section and topic.

Attempt is the count of how many/what percentage of the total questions you answered.
Generally, you should answer at least 70%-80% of the questions.

Accuracy is the count of how many/what percentage of the attempted questions you got correct. Generally, this should also be 70-80%

Accuracy is important because there’s a negative marking of -0.25 for every wrong answer you select. However, my hot take is that attempt rate is more important and hence should be slightly higher than your accuracy.

With this strategy, I attempted 66 out of the 70 questions on my IBA admission test and got around 60. I could answer so many because I was very fast at everything. The most challenging part of the IBA admission test is the time crunch. You always have to keep your time in check.

In the test result page, you can see the time taken in total, in each section, and in each topic. You can even see the time taken per question, which should be less than 2 minutes.

However, the time you take in each question should differ vastly across different topics, so it’s hard to come up with some ideal stat for this. So just like the median in total score, here we’ve shown the Average time taken from all the test takers for each question. If the time you’ve taken far exceeds the average, you’ll know it could’ve been solved much faster and learn that process.

In each question, it shows the % of people who skipped, the % of people who got it correct, and a difficulty evaluation of the question based on those: easy/medium/hard..

If you’ve skipped a question that very few (let's say only 9%) people have skipped, then you missed an opportunity. And if you got a question wrong that 60% people have got correct, again you missed an easy mark and lost 0.25!

You can also see the % of people who selected each option. You can check a question that everyone except you got right and perhaps cry a little. But if you see that most people got it wrong, you can feel better.

Note: To get into IBA, you don’t need to solve the hard and lengthy questions; you just need to secure the easy/medium marks in the minimum time.

I won't geek out any longer. I am supposed to make things easier for you, not complicate them.

You’ll get some remarks (needs work/great..) in the results. If the numbers confuse you, just follow these remarks. You can also just follow the colors of the stats. If something is red, it’s bad. If it’s yellow/orange, it needs improvement. If green, it’s great.

Don’t stress yourself out. Have fun with it. It’s more about the journey than the destination. You’ll realize that eventually. Best of luck!