UCEED Exam Analysis 2019 & Cut Off by Experts

UCEED exam was conducted on January 19, 2019. Most questions were not direct as they were designed to test a candidate's ability to make connections between two or more subjects parallelly. Go through UCEED test pattern, difficulty level and cutoffs on Shiksha.

UCEED Exam Analysis 2019 - UCEED 2019 was successfully conducted by IIT Bombay on January 19, 2019. It was a computer based exam for undergraduate design programmes across 20-24 cities. The test was overall, without any technical issues but the general impression from students was that the paper was lengthy and hence time management was key. The mix of questions given in the exam was different from the last year’s question paper but followed a similar exam pattern with the same level of difficulty.

With regards to the question mix, we noticed a few changes that the focus was much more on the Visual Spatial ability side as compared to last year and there were lesser English questions. The questions were very cleverly weaving two or three topics into one and the students were tested on their ability to simultaneously apply their knowledge. There were a few direct General knowledge questions, like

• 4 images of birds were given and the student had to choose the bird which is not native to India.

• A question on dolls (handicrafts) of different countries in the world and the student had to match the doll to each country

• A metal artifact was given and one had to guess the manufacturing process involved in making the product like – Forging, bending, punching and twisting*.

*This also re-enforces manufacturing process which is a favorite topic asked in UCEED and one must not only know bookish knowledge, but actually how products are made in different stages of manufacturing processes.

A lot of questions in UCEED 2019 were asked on applied General knowledge, which use your basic knowledge of science as well as observation, such as:

• 4 Images of a hand gripping a cylinder were given and the student had to pick out grip that exerts maximum force
• Also a question was given on the movement of a ferris wheel, the right movement of chairs had to be selected if the wheel was moving in an anticlockwise direction

• 4 different types of cutting tools were shown – choose the correct working principle

• An interesting question was asked on the anatomy/ bone structure of a horse*

• The anatomy question about the bones on the neck of a horse was very interesting because if a student was good in animal sketches or had done some basic bone structure study or has some basic knowledge of zoology or was observant while watching knowledge based television programs on animal bone structures could guess this questions. Questions on animal bone structures have been asked in the past on Gorillas in an NID paper.

Questions on pure general observation were asked in UCEED 2019 like

• Animation sequences where a girl was shown running – guess the right pose

• Animation sequences of a frog jumping – guess the right pose

• The front view of a batsman was given – choose the correct side view

• A cartoon image girl looking at herself in the mirror – guess the right mirror image

• A girl pointing a torch towards her face in the dark – identify the correct lighting pattern*

* Here the students observation skills and common sense was tested

Overall a large amount of questions were clearly Visual or Logical questions – The type of questions covered were, symmetry, typography based questions – distinguishing between fonts given (Note: Questions on fonts is very favorite topic in UCEED), counting type of questions, development of solids (also dice based questions on surface development), paper folding cutting, orthographic views, rotation of 3D solids, merging and dividing of solids, visual sequences, visual logic puzzles, Some of the interesting questions are

• Different footwear prints were given the correct pair had to be found

• An A symmetrical 2D pattern of an Owl was given and the student had to figure out how many pieces has to be moved for it to become symmetrical – this is like a visual puzzle

• 2 images of grass where given and one had to figure out the transformation from figure one to two, whether it is flipped, rotated or mirrored

• A tee-shirt with a print was folded and the final folded image had to be selected

• Also a very interesting visual puzzle type of question where 2 images were given and one had to figure out the overlay of both of them (merged)

The UCEED examination was of 3 hours duration with a total of 85 questions carrying a total of 300 marks. The paper was divided into three sections, consisting of Numerical Answer Type, Multiple Select Questions and Multiple Choice Questions and all sections were compulsory.

To conclude, most questions were not direct as they were designed to test your ability to make connections between two or more subjects parallelly. Solving past years’ papers along with the online sample mock test will give you a good idea of the difficulty level of the paper along with the time pressure. The topics are shuffled every year and are unpredictable hence the student needs to have very strong fundamentals in each of the topics.

Some time management tips would be to make sure that the student has a good mental mathematics ability because for 2019 the UCEED exam did not provide an on screen calculator, unlike the previous years. The exam has a very good system of managing the sections, one can skip fluidly between questions or sections, not having to answer it in the given order. This means the student should play to their strengths and answer the questions they are 100% confident first, then move to the moderate/doubtful questions and then save the tough questions for the end. Lastly for the negative marking section, a lot of students believe they should leave questions blank because of negative marking, this is highly untrue. It is well known that elimination and smart guessing an answer still gives a higher probability of scoring marks.

Also Read:

• UCEED 2019 Cutoff
• UCEED 2019 Student Reaction
• NID Entrance Exam 2019 Student Reaction for BDes & MDes Admissions
• NIFT Entrance Exam 2019 Student Reaction
• CEED 2019 Student Reaction

About the Author:

Shaun D’Sa has a Master’s degree in Industrial Design from IIT Delhi. He is Director at Design Quotient Labs (DQ Labs), a coaching platform for Architecture and Design entrance exams.

He began his career with General Motors Advanced Design Center at Bangalore, where he had the opportunity to work with design teams for car brands like Hummer, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Holden, Buick to name a few. Shaun has also been a part of many teams of International and Indian designers for design centric ethnographic studies across India and abroad. Due to his passion for Design and Architecture, he has travelled extensively abroad and has been a part of many design workshops in many countries across Europe.