CAT '09 and Beyond ....

Let me start by quoting a paragraph about CAT '09 from the wikipedia entry for Common Admission Test, more commonly known as CAT.

The first ever computer based CAT conducted by Prometric during 28'th nov-7'th dec created a lot news, mostly for the wrong reasons. On the one hand, technical glitches attributed to hardware problems and virus attacks made sure that around 8,000 students were not able to appear in CAT in their allotted slots, on the other hand a lot of controversy around depreciated standards, repeated questions and different difficulty level for different slots ensured that people started demanding to have a paper based retest.

CAT organizing committee didn't agree to this demand and instead allotted extra slots on 8'th dec and later on 30'th and 31'st jan for those who couldn't appear in the tests due to glitches.

The controversy didn't end here but followed a long delay in declaration of results, which was deferred many a times and finally announced on 28'th feb, with IIM A and IIM S declaring the list of shortlisted candidates while the result website maintains that lists for other IIMs is awaited. While the website mentions that the scores reported are the scaled scores arrived at by establishing psychometric equivalences to adjust for any variation in difficulty levels across the tests, but it lacks any information as in how it is done. Owing to this and other reasons it is likely to attract a plethora of applications filed under RTI.

Being honest, a lot of people had expected that the first ever online CAT might not go very smooth, but even the most pessimistic ones won't have have thought that it could go as it did.

Right from the word GO, CAT 2009 proved to be a disaster. In the initial stages the form filling interface posed a lot of difficulties to many students but it proved to be just a tip of the iceberg when the process reached its subsequent stages.

Prometric, a U.S. Company was awarded the contract for organizing

And then the doom started, starting from the first day, first slot. The process of "CAT going Global" and the world renowned testing company Prometric seemed to be a part of joke which was played with the fates of some 2.5 lakh students. A point to note here is although one of the reasons IIMs gave in favor of CBT was that its user friendly but even in times of recession the number of aspirants applying for CAT went down something never heard of and never been imagined.

Varying difficulty level across different slots, repeated questions from previous year CAT papers and initial slots and canceled tests because of so called virus attacks which some-how the globally renowned TESTING agency failed to catch are some of the points which amused the students, and though there was a huge demand for retest from almost all sections of society, autonomous CAT authorities decided against it.

In response to the repeated questions a un-resolved logic of some kind of psychometric equivalence was provided, nobody has/had any idea about the marking scheme or the negative marks or about what would follow next.

What followed this is was a seemingly endless wait for results with a website which was seldom updated, a help-line where no-one knew the dates of results and a result which few people could trust, people who had scored in 99s in other entrance examinations and previous year CATs suddenly landed up with percentiles in 90s; people who were full-time faculty of VA in prestigious coaching Institutes for CAT preparation landed up 60 odd percentile in VA, people who had left the lower ranked IIMs to read in the upper ranked ones landed up fighting for calls from the IIMs they had converted and left, people in the dream team of pagalguy.com the largest MBA forum, whose DT has a record of 3 hundred percentilers with a lot of BLACKIS previous year,landed up with no-one in 99.9x and a lot of guys with no calls at all.

A lot of doubts and questions follow this, does all of preparation and pain for studying in the prestigious Indian Institutes of Managements really worth it. Is it really worthwhile to study management from people who can't manage their own entrance exam, from people who have less confidence on their own methodologies than on the so called globally accepted ones disregarding the fact that whether or not they are appropriate in Indian context.

And the biggest doubt as a cat 2010 aspirant asked on a public forum .

" If CAT is really going to be like this, why am I even preparing for it?".

Hope that CAT is not going to be like this, and that people start realizing that just because something is global, doesn't mean its beyond debate or that it can't have any faults or that it can't be further improved or that its valid in all contexts.

Amen ....