THE CAT HAS DIED

Bangalore 5 am. Alarm rings Rahul checks his cellphone and with a sad look, he stands up. There is no escape now. This year he has promised to himself to get into a very good B –School, and to achieve this, he knows that he has to be fully committed else he will not be able to make up this time also. Any one who has been in touch with professional education in India will know very well how hard it takes to get into a prestigious B-School like IIM’s, XLRI, FMS, SIBM etc., Rahul was also among the thousands of working IT Professional who want to pursue MBA and subsequently pursue their dreams which otherwise would have started fading in their current job.

‘CAT’ as it is famously known is the combined management aptitude test conducted by the IIM’s every year. Each year somewhere around 3 lakh students appear in this test.
Apart from the IIM’s many other institute of high repute like NITIE Mumbai, Mica, and Great lakes Chennai consider the CAT scores. So obviously the stakes are always very high for this particular exam. Given this scenario it becomes extremely important that the authorities conduct this test in the fairest way. There is no room for any discrepancies of even single mark and not even to a single student. As expected the IIM’s were doing the job perfectly and deserves special appreciation. But CAT 2009 was an exception to this.

“CAT may go online this year”. This was the latest surprise news from the IIM’s.
Change no matter how much trivial brings with itself some amount of fear, some amount of apprehension and some amount of uncertainty. Those who can adapt to the change are successful others vanish. Being an eternal optimist Rahul decided to deal with the CAT. “If not pencil and paper let us bell the cat with the help of the mouse”, thought Rahul. He religiously attended all the computer based mocks conducted by his coaching institute.

The online test was suppose to begin on 28th of December and will continue till the period of 10 days. Two slots each day will mean that there will be 20 different question papers!
Rahul has taken the slot of 5th December and his close friend Neelam has taken the slot on 6th December. They both met in the coaching and he was always seeking her help in Verbal doubts. As soon as the first slot exam was over, rumors were in the air about the level of difficulty of questions, number of questions and the type of question. Day by day their nervousness was increasing. The year long preparation will boil down to the last 2 hrs and 15 minutes. Neelam was consoling him and he was doing the same to her.

Few people say that nervous energy brings out the best of the performance out of an Individual. But it was not all about nervousness. There was high level of discrepancies in the whole online process. IIM's tried emulate other universities like Stanford, MIT, Oxford which uses the services of GMAC testing agency. IIM's also tried to delink them from the Admission process but surprisingly they did not find the GMAT scores good enough to to be used for admission process. What they wanted is a special exam meant only for the IIM's. So for the same purpose they decided to take the services of Pro metric testing agency. Pro metric is a US based firm. It may be providing testing services for campus recruitment etc. but to organize an exam of National level importance pro metric was never ready.
What was ready and bound to happen was a disaster on the CAT D day. The very day on which our CAT died. On the first day of the test, servers at several test centers failed.
There was complete panic among the students. The failure of the servers continued through out the CAT window. It will be confusing to describe the factors which finally resulted in a fiasco so it will be better if we point them out for the of the readers.

Reason for why our CAT became sick:

1. Test servers throughout the test window kept on crashing. IIM's and pro metric gave the reason that a virus attack has happened. Can anyone please tell us the name of the virus?
2. One of the students was writing the test. Being aware of the system failure he has already written 8 quantitative questions on the paper. Suddenly his system restarted. He called the pro metric team. They asked him to go to a chair near by and wait. He was waiting for almost one hour. After one hour they called him that the system is ready. He went happily to restart with the test. You know why he was happy? He has already solved 8 questions and still 2 hrs were left.
3. Though pro metric claims that they have carefully developed the question bank, questions which were coming in the exam were far below the standard of CAT. Almost everyone solved 45 out of 60 questions. Most of the people who worked hard didn't get the chance to showcase their talent. So it became a luck game more than an aptitude game.
4. In one instance one student got to see the list of answers for his question set! This is one of the instances which came into light. There may be many more which might have gone unnoticed. What ever pro metric claims this thing is not at all acceptable.
5. Although there was a non-disclosure agreement. But people kept on disclosing the questions to each other. And few actually got repeated with just the change of numeric values.
6. With the cognizance that the pro metric software is virus prone. Can we be 100 percent sure that what we have thought and marked as correct answer is getting saved as the correct answer only or at least getting saved at the first place or not.
7. IIM's have rescheduled the test for some 20000 students on 30th and 31st January. These students got a complete 2 months extra for the preparation. The pattern and level of questions was already known to them. Is this fair?
   

Even after a lot of request and protest by the students. IIM's are still firm on their stand that there was no problem with the online test and things are alright.
If they say so we agree. But why it is then few institutes like MICA have rejected the CAT scores this time. And IIM's too have brought down the CAT score weight age in the overall selection from 90 to 50.

These were the few reasons why our very own CAT became sick in December 2009. An emergency medical service was required but she didn't get at the right time. So she left us. Now unless IIM's revert back to the friendly paper pencil test or take the services of credible GMAC whose GMAT score is accepted worldwide, I am afraid our CAT will ever come back to us.