IFSCA Grade A- Puzzles & Seating Arrangement Tips

Are You Ready for Puzzles/ Seating Arrangement Questions?

IFSCA Grade A will take place in the month of April 2023. This leaves with you barely 15-20 days of revision. By now you must be clear with the syllabus & topics of the Reasoning section. One of the topics which the aspirants often find challenging is Puzzles & Seating Arrangement. This topic falls into a high-risk high-reward category where if you are able to solve the puzzle/seating arrangement, you get all the related questions correct and gain all the marks for that puzzle. On the other hand, if you couldn’t solve the puzzle, you end up wasting 7-8 precious minutes. In a worst-case scenario, because of a minute mistake, if you answered the questions incorrectly, you will lose precious marks and time which would be extremely detrimental to your overall score. Let’s have a look at the major categorization of puzzles/ seating arrangements.

• Table-based puzzle
• Games & Tournament based puzzle
• Seating Arrangement (Box/ Shelf/ Floor based)

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Pick the Easy Puzzles/ Seating Arrangement First

It would obviously be a smart choice to pick the easy puzzles first, solve them and then move to the difficult ones. Now the question arises- How would you get to know which puzzle/ seating arrangement is easy and which one is difficult? Well! It’s only by consistent practice that you can assess the difficulty level of a puzzle/ seating arrangement. When you solve back-to-back puzzles, you deal with different kinds of puzzles with different difficulty levels. Practising via Mock Tests shows you detailed solutions which you can compare with your solutions and introspect on where you went wrong. Dealing with different kinds of puzzles in Mock Tests also helps you get familiar with them and slowly get expertise in puzzles.

Tips for Puzzles/ Seating Arrangements

In this article, we have come up with some tips which you should take with a pinch of salt. Please be informed that these tips may work on a majority of puzzles but exceptions are always there. So it would be a wise idea to use these tips to solve puzzles when you take Mock Tests in the remaining days. Let’s have a look at the tips:

• Always start with the definite information which is provided. Those lay a good foundation for the puzzle. Once all the definite information has been considered, start looking at the possible info and consider all the possibilities.
• A puzzle/ seating arrangement with more positive info is generally easy to solve than the one which has more negative info. Negative info generally leads to multiple possibilities and you may end up missing one or two possibilities. This may result in incorrect answers.
• If the puzzle/ seating arrangement seems long and there is a lot of information available, it may become easy for you to identify and answer the question.
• Generally, the more parameters are there in a puzzle, the more difficult it becomes. Scan the info on the puzzle/ seating arrangement quickly and compare the number of parameters with the provided info to analyze the solvability of that puzzle.
• Check if the questions contain additional/conditional info which is applicable to only that question. If this is the case, this will lead to multiple possibilities making the puzzle/ seating arrangement more complicated.
• If there is a puzzle/ seating arrangement of a new pattern, you need to be cautious. It may be an easy one or it may be a difficult one which would waste your time. Solve Mock Tests to get acquainted and to tackle the puzzles of new patterns.

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We hope these tips will help you pick the right puzzles and will help you solve them in minimal time. Remember, there’s no shortcut to practice. The more practice you do via Mock Tests, the more skillset you gain when it comes to solving puzzles/ seating arrangement questions.

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