The smiles are back on the faces of Tata graduate engineer trainees.

Tata trainee engineers cornered the top five slots of Xavier Admission Test (XAT) ' the entrance test for Jamshedpur's XLRI and other top business schools of India ' the results of which were uploaded on Thursday night.

According to the results, Saurabh Singh Gaur of Tata Hitachi Construction Machinery Pvt Ltd (earlier Telcon) walked away with the cake scoring a whopping 99.94 per cent to top the entrance. Four Tata Motors trainee engineers ' Rahul Srivastava (98.82 per cent), Kunal Priyadarshi (98.41 per cent), Sumit Pandey (98.25 per cent) and Sandeep Kumar Jha (98.14 per cent) ' tailed Gaur on the list.

Sources said around 92,045 candidates had appeared for XAT this year on January 6. Of them 2,166 students managed to clear the XLRI cut-off, which required a minimum of 92 per cent for admission in its human resources management course and 95 per cent for business management.

The Jamshedpur-based cradle will now select, after a round of group discussion and personal interviews in February, 120 students for its human resources management course and another 120 business management students.

"I had managed a 98.43 per cent in CAT and was expecting a call from IIM-Kanpur and IIM-Lucknow. However, after the XAT results I am definitely going in for a operations course at XLRI now. It will help me climb the corporate ladder," Gaur, who hails from Lucknow and is an assistant manager (quality assurance) with Tata Hitachi, said. He completed his BTech from NIT, Surat, and has been attending private classes at a city-based MBA coaching centre.

Interestingly, XAT this time had tweaked its examination pattern a bit, probably to get a better mix of students, and also raised its cut-off levels. The XAT authorities had increased the time length of the paper and introduced a general knowledge section.

"The cut-offs were raised and the pattern was different this year. We are expecting a bright and good mix of students," said Vishwa Vallabh, head of admissions, XLRI.