IIM Bangalore announces short-list of candidates for interviews

The Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore today announced the list of candidates shorlisted by it for interviews, eight days after the results of the IIMs' Common Admission Test (CAT 2009) were declared on February 28.

IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Shillong had put up their short-lists on the CAT website on February 28 itself, while IIM Calcutta (PGDM, PGDCM) and IIM Lucknow did it on March 2. IIM Kozhikode had announced its short-list on March 5.

The IIM at Indore and the new IIM at Ranchi, which will begin its first academic session this year, are yet to announce their lists so far.

The CAT scorecards are used by the elite IIMs for admission of students to their flagship two-year post-graduate programmes in management as well as for their Fellow programmes. Many other business schools also use the CAT scores in their admission process.

CAT 2009 was the first time that the examination was conducted as a computer-based online test. It was conducted in the pencil-and-paper format for 33 years before that.

The original schedule for the test was between November 28 and December 7, 2009 which was extended by a day to December 8 to accommodate thousands of students who could not appear during the ten-day window because of technical glitches at several centres across the country.

The IIMs ultimately had to schedule a re-test on January 30 and 31 for about 11,000 candidates who faced problems during the original schedule.

A total of 241,582 had candidates registered for CAT 2009. The test is reputed to be the toughest entrance examination for business schools in the world.

Apart from IIM Ranchi, three more IIMs at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, Raipur in Chhattisgarh and Rohtak in Haryana were also due to start functioning from 2010-11. Two others in Uttarakhand and Rajasthan are due to be set up in the next year.

NNN