Choose your CAT date

Updated on: Friday, June 25, 2010

There will be no fixed day for taking the Common Admission Test (CAT) from this year. You will have multiple choices of dates, spread over a month, to take the online entrance test to the IIMs — the country’s premier B-schools.

The exam went online last year but was so riddled with trouble that it was cancelled after a couple of days. The IIMs have once again asked Prometric to conduct the test on their behalf.

In the prolonged schedule from this year, small batches of examinees countrywide will take the exam during a ‘testing capsule’. This will enable Prometric to monitor every centre and check if there are any technological glitches anywhere. Prometric attributed last year’s trouble to a virus attack that spread to a large number of testing centres and disabled the exam. Examinees complained of screens freezing, going blank or corrupt when they tried to log on or even when they had written the exam half way.

Unlike last time, when a large number of local institutions having computer laboratories had tied up with Prometric for CAT, this time the organiser is tying up with every technology partner after stringent quality tests. “We’ll have much fewer exam centres this time but each will be selected carefully and then sanitized over a long period of time. Each test site preparation will take months. We have also developed a superior software to offer swifter results,” said Prometric managing director Soumitra Roy.

Having fewer centres does not mean that there will be a compromise on the nationwide reach of the exam, Roy assured.

While traditionally the exam has always happened in November, this time the exam is expected to start much earlier so that dates do not clash with college exams, which was another complaint last year.

After nearly a six-month probe into what went wrong with CAT 2009, Prometric has zeroed in on a virus and where it emanated from. The possibility of is not being ruled out. “We have assessed the performance of each centre and taken into account candidates’ feedback. Both have given us vital clues in our investigations, the findings of which would be released soon,” said an official.
Since the exam went glitch-free after the initial hiccups last year, a large number of measures adopted then will naturally continue this year as well.

“We were able to identify the problem and plug the holes but a lot of damage had been done by then. Naturally, when we started with our preparations for this year’s exam, we went back to those remedies,” Roy added. The dates of CAT 2010 and the centres will soon be announced by Prometric.

Choose your CAT date

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