HRD Ministry to discuss CAT issues with IIM Directors on Wednesday

The Directors of all the seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are scheduled to meet Higher Education Secretary Vibha Puri Das here tomorrow to discuss the issues arising out of the technical glitches that marred their Common Admission Test (CAT) this year after it went online for the first time.

Thousands of candidates could not appear for the test or had faced the problems because of the technical problems that arose during the examination that was held on ten days from November 28 to December 7.

Later, an extra session was held on December 8 in 20 cities to accomodate as many of those who were unable to give the test on their scheduled days. On the same day, the IIMs announced that all candidates who could not take the CAT on the scheduled dates would be given the opportunity to do so on a new test date to be announced in about a fortnight.

Tomorrow's meeting is being held against the background of a demand in some quarters for the scrapping of the computer-based test. The Human Resource Development ministry is expected to use the opportunity to express its serious concern over the turn of events and ask the IIMs what their plans were on dealing with the situation.

"This additional day would allow most candidates, who could not take the test in their scheduled slots, to take the test," the IIMs and Prometric, which has been selected by the elite institutes to deliver the examination, had said in a press release.

"There are still some candidates who could not take the test due to genuine reasons and test has not been rescheduled for them. A new test date will be announced in about a fortnight to provide an opportunity to ALL such candidates to write the test," the release had said.

It said Prometric would inform all such candidates about the date and the venue for the test.

Prometric had said candidates at various locations had experienced technical difficulties related to computer viruses.

The computer-based online CAT involved the delivery of examinations on 17,000 computers in 361 temporary testing labs at 104 centres in 32 cities throughout India.

A total of 241,582 had candidates registered for CAT 2009. The test, reputed to be the toughest entrance examination for business schools in the world, was held in the paper-and-pencil format for the past 33 years. Till last year, it used to be held in a single session on the same day -- usually the third Sunday of November -- across the country.

In the first few days of this year's CAT, hundreds of candidates could not appear for the test on their scheduled days because of technical glitches, which Prometric attributed to computer viruses, malware and other difficulties. Many of those who did appear for the examination also complained of a variety of other problems that they faced.

On day 2 and 3, about 50 of the affected labs had a planned closure to avoid further inconvenience to the candidates and to allow for all the necessary repairs to be completed.

The CAT is a pre-requisite for admission to various management programmes conducted by the IIMs, including their flagship two-year Post-Graduate Programmes (PGP) in Management. Many other institutions also use the CAT scores to finalise admissions to their management programmes.

The seven IIMs are located at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Lucknow, Kozhikode, Indore and Shillong.

Four more IIMs are due to start functioning from the academic session 2010-11 at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, Ranchi in Jharkhand, Raipur in Chhattisgarh and Rohtak in Haryana. Two others in Uttarakhand and Rajasthan will be set up the following year.

The CAT score cards will be available on the CAT website from January 22, 2010.

NNN