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YAHOO PAPER ON 29th JULY AT RVCE,BANGLORE

Hello,I'am a 3rd year student of Engineering(Information Science branch) from RVCE Bangalore.

Campus placements have started for us and Infosys was the first company to come, but  I did not write the test. YAHOO came here on 29th of july '04 and recruited 50 students out of the 350 who took the online test. 101 students cleared the psychometry test, out which 50 were chosen after the interview and GD.
6 students from my branch including me made it through. I became a member of this group 6 months back, and its been very helpful. I think this group was very instrumental in helping me get through the test.
By the information posted by freshers who had recently taken up the YAHOO test, I had a fairly good idea about the pattern and the kind of preparation I needed to do. the pattern is as follows..

VERBAL( 20 min):
5 synonyms, 10 antonyms( all from BARRON'S GRE book. Please work on the exercises given in it). And in addition to this there was a paragraph given with blanks in it. Each blank had a number in brackets( this refers to the question no). to fill these blanks 5 sentences were given. We had to choose the appropriate sentence which would fit in to the blank so that there was continuity between the sentences preceding and following the blank. This was very difficult.

QUANTITATIVE (40 min):
This was the easiest section. Solve all the old questions from the previous papers of YAHOO and your sure to attempt 90% of the questions. There were some data interpretation questions also (10 in number). Totally 50 questions, so managing the time is very important.

CRITICAL REASONING (30 min):
This section had 3 questions with 4 sub questions each. One question was very simple having a 5 delegates speaking different languages and questions based on them. Another question was on seating arrangement and the third question was on time table for a student to take up various classes. I was told that similar can be found in the Barron's GRE book from 12th edition. Please practise solving such questions as the time given is very less.

After I submitted my answers, I got the psychometry test on the screen. 150 questions with yes no can't say as the answers. A lot of students were eliminated from this also so be frank while answering the questions and don't try to change the answers once u have marked them.

The next day interviews were held. Around 20 people had come. My interview went well. Basically it was Technical, but he also asked HR questions. There were 2 people. One guy would look straight at me as I was answering, observing keenly and the other guy was looking in to the form that we were asked to fill up and asking me questions. Some of the questions were :

Tell us about yourself.
What was your DBMS project all about. What s/w you used for it?
Are comfortable using MS Visual Basic?
What is ODBC?                                         
What is a binary tree?                           
What do you call a binary tree in which the value of the nodes to left of the root is less than that of those on the right of the root?
Do you know C?              
What about pointers?                 
Write a structure for a node in a doubly linked list.( he asked me explain the structure)
What are the different types of file structures(we had file structure project in 6th semester)
What do you mean by Indexing? What are the different types of indexing?
What is your career objective?
What are the leadership qualities that you think you have? ( he asked me this because I said in would like to be a project leader in 3 years time)
Did you write infosys test yesterday? (I said no)
He asked me why? (I told him about the world-class training provided by YAHOO etc)

The interview panel was very cool and friendly. They did not intimidate us. There were many light moments during the interview when they were cracking jokes.( the member of the panel offered me coffee before he started asking questions!!) I was totally at ease. Just maintain the eye contact and look at every member of the panel. A couple of times they even helped me get to the answer.
After this we were grouped together in to batches of 10 and GD was conducted. The topics were :
America's invasion of Iraq: is it justified or not?
Todays IT scenario is a total eye-wash.
Is it necessary to have an IT background to work in It industry.

As I heard from the previous batches, GD was utter chaos with everyone literally screaming. So I made an attempt to start the GD, and succeeded. After that I got only one chance to speak. Rest of the time I was listening to others and agreeing or disagreeing with them. I tried to make people who were silent to speak. Basically if you make yourselves heard a couple of times its enough. Try to be a good listener, that's very important. Don't pound on the table and don't try to overpower others.

Finally after two days of grueling tests, I finally made through. Though it was mentally and physically very taxing, I think it was ultimately worth it. Though this was the first placement test ever, I have seen  my friends not making it through, and I know how hard it is, but please don't loose hopes.  I thank this group, its members and the moderators from the bottom of my heart.

PLEASE REMEBER I AM A FINAL YEAR STUDENT AND NOT AN EMPLOYEE OF YAHOO SO PLEASE DON'T ASK FOR EMPLOYEE REFFERALS. 

I would be more than glad to help you.
Thank you once again and all the best to everybody.

Regards
Sona