IIMs to set new date for candidates who could not take CAT 2009

The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have announced that all candidates who could not take their Common Admission Test (CAT 2009) on the scheduled dates because of technical glitches would be given the opportunity to do so on a new test date to be announced in about a fortnight.

The CAT, being conducted as a computer-based test for the first time this year and originally scheduled to run from November 28 to December 7, had already been extended by a day today.

The extra session of the examination this morning is being conducted in 20 cities: Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin (Kochi), Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Pune and Varanasi.

"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, 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 said.

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

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

It said it was currently reviewing the experiences of all the candidates who might have been impacted by computer viruses and/or other sources of potential disruption.

"One of the key advantages of computer-based delivery is the ability to electronically record a candidate's exam and identify issues that might affect an individual's performance. That assessment is already underway and with the consent of the IIMs, Prometric will be offering a new test to the candidates who were impacted in this way," the company said.

"The vast majority of virus programmes are written to work with or corrupt commonly available file formats, such as executable files, and exploit functionality in commonly available applications such as e-mail programmes, internet browsers, and operating systems. The proprietary result files used by Prometric fall outside the scope of what a typical virus is capable of attacking, thereby vastly reducing the risk of exposure to these viruses," it said.

According to Prometric, the result files produced during an examination are encrypted prior to being written to disk. This procedure enhances the security of the content and provides a degree of protection from virus infection and/or destruction. Any such tampering with the files would be detected when the test results are imported into the data processing system and subsequent item analysis.

"To date, Prometric's ongoing event reconciliation processes have verified that no results have been deleted or modified by a virus attack. The majority of sites and candidates have tested without incident and their performance indicates that most candidates had a valid and fair experience," the company added.

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 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 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