Company: Aricent Group

Hello Everyone!

I was shortlisted for the Aricent Referral Drive and
asked to appear for a General Aptitude and Technical(C or C++ or JAVA) test
on 2nd Feb at Gurgaon.

1. Written test: There were 4 sections in the written test.

SECTION 1 – Aptitude questions involving Logarithmic questions, Data interpretation, Distance, Work, Find the next figure in sequence, Odd number, Next number in series. This section was easy. If your are good in calculations and remember the formulas then just go for it and if not then do practice. Some of the questions that I remember were:

i. Find the wrong number in the series: 69,62,68,64,65,66,63
Ans: 68. Alternatively subtract 2 then add 2.

For question no. ii to v:
A country trades with Us, UK and India. The country has following currency denominations: Guineas, Tuineas, Buineas and Wuineas. A pound is equivalent to 21 INR and a dollar is equivalent to 14 INR.

a. 1 buinea is greater than 2 dollar but less than 4 dollars.
b. 5 tuinea is equal to 7 pound.
c. Among Tuinea, Guinea and Wuinea, one is equal to the sum of others.
d. A guinea is equal to 2/3 or 3/2 of a tuinea and A wuinea is equal to 2/3 or 3/2 of a buinea.

ii.What is the value of Buinea in Rupees?
iii.What is the value of Tuinea in Rupees?
iv.What is the value of Guinea in Rupees?
v.What is the value of Wuinea in Rupees?

vi. All bats are birds
Some birds are animals.
Are some bats animals? True False or Uncertain.

vii. If * stands for -, + stands for /, – stands for * and / stands for +, what is value of 21+4-16/48*8?

SECTION 2 – Presence of Mind. It was the easiest but you have to be careful.

Chose option 1 if all are similar, 2 if first and second are similar, 3 if first and third are similar and 4 if none are similar in value.

i. 32411015, 32411815, 32411015
Ans: 3 because option one and three are only similar.

ii. Following is the criteria for company ABC to hire call centre employees:

A. Candidate should have scored 75% and above in class 10th and 12th
B. Candidate should be 24 years of age on 24th July 2003.
C. Candidate should have minimum 2 years of experience.
D. Candidate should have scored 45% in graduation.

If option D does not fulfil but candidate scored 90% in 10th and 12th then candidate is put on wait list.

If option C does not fulfil then candidate is hired as trainee.

Sudhir scored 60% in graduation and has been working for XYZ Call centre for 36 months. He scored 78% in 10th and 75% in 12th. He celebrated his 26th birthday on November of 2005. What will ABC do?

a. Recruit him.
b. Hire him as trainee
c. Reject his candidature.
d. Not enough info available.

SECTION 3 – This was DATA STRUCTURE. There were few tough questions but if your are thorough with the following concepts then it will be a piece of cake for you:
Linked list, Queues, Stacks, Trees, Sorting and searching, Complexity of algos.

i. Which sorting complexity has Average as well as worst case complexity equal to n square.

ii. Which of these is the correct algo for inserting and displaying from a stack
Ans: While Top < Size Get input Push Input Increment Top End While While Top >=0
Pop Top
Output Top
Decrement Top
End While

iii. What is a Binary Tree?

a. Infinite tree with empty nodes or nodes with not more than two childs.
b. Finite tree with non-empty nodes and root node with two childs.
c. Infinite tree with non empty nodes.
d. Finite tree with root node and each node with two childs.

Ans: a.

SECTION 4 – This section was domain specific. You can choose from C or C++ or JAVA. I went with ‘C’ and this was the toughest section for me. Know your basics. Especially pointers, array and strings(Array of Characters).
Output Questions mainly.

Lastly they will ask you to fill a form(read boring form) which is for HR purposes. Questions in the form were like:

Describe a situation when you helped some out of a tough spot when you yourself had lot of work.

Describe an incidence when you started an unpopular opinion.

Describe a situation when you worked on something you had no or little knowledge about.

Out of some 400 candidates who appeared, they shortlisted 91 and called us next day(3rd Feb) for Technical GD and HR rounds.

Day two began smoothly but turned into hooch pooch kind of situation.
GD was easy. We were allowed to discuss and choose a topic and since most of us there were together for like an hour, we had pre-decided upon a topic. But if you make it a fish market then there will be consequences. Just don’t fight in the GD. Ours went very smoothly. only one person spoke at a time and everyone got appreciated.

Next was Technical interview. Questions are asked based on your domain. So they asked me about C. OS, Linked List, Networking and DBMS were asked from everyone but only basics. Following questions were asked from me:

Difference between Definition and Declaration?

What are the storage types in C? Describe them.

Difference between structure and union. What is padding in structure?

Write a function which accepts a pointer to string value as parameter and returns reversed string?

What is queue? Write a program to delete an element from a queue using arrays.

What is paging? What is page fault?

What is thrashing? What is starvation and ageing?

What are the layers of OSI model? Difference between Network and Transport layer.

What are IP addresses? What are the classes in IP addresses?

Know your basics in C and DS because they go in depth of the question.

HR round is related to the FORM that we filled earlier. It is very simple. You don’t have to prepare for this one.

But They weren’t sending everyone for HR round so we thought it was an elimination round but the HR Lady kept saying that Technical round was not elimination round and not everyone has to appear for HR. But I am pretty sure that no HR means no selection as in my case.

Let me know if there are any doubts.