FRONT PAGE | Monday, November 30, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Net effect: CAT goes for a toss again
Staff Reporter | New Delhi
The Common Admission Test (CAT), which went online for the first time this year, was once again hit on Sunday by technical problems and poor management, affecting students in as many as 24 test centres in 13 cities across the country. On Sunday, while the organisers posted an update on its official website announcing the rescheduling of the exam in 49 labs in 24 centres across India, there was no direct communication, either through mail or SMS to the students, creating much confusion. In many cases, students had reached their test centres when they were told to go back home.
The test in 24 centres across the country was rescheduled. This has been done to allow necessary repairs to be done at the labs where technical glitches disrupted the exams on the first day. Officials of Prometric, the American firm which has been entrusted with the task of conducting the tests, said while a significant majority of the candidates successfully completed their exams on Saturday, various technical issues arose at a few computers in approximately 50 labs in these 24 centres that prevented approximately 2000 exams from being delivered.
“Prometric technicians have been dispatched to address these isolated problems. To avoid candidate inconvenience and to allow for the necessary repairs to be completed at the impacted labs, Prometric scheduled a closure of these labs on Sunday,” an announcement on the CAT-IIM official website said. “Candidates affected by this closure will also be notified by Prometric in the manner described above and provided with new appointments within this year’s testing period,” the announcement said. It said Prometric has generated new appointments for individuals who could not take the test on Saturday and they are in the process of being contacted through SMS and email messages. The first-ever experiment of the IIMs to conduct its CAT using computers ran into trouble on Saturday in many centres across the country.
Soon after the exam started, students faced problems in opening the computers at 11 centers in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Bhopal. Among the labs that will be closed today, 11 are in Bangalore, followed by Bhopal (8), Lucknow (6), Mumbai (6), New Delhi (5), Ghaziabad (4), Varanasi (2), Hyderabad (2), Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Nagpur, Kolkata and Coimbatore (1 each). Several students appearing for the first online Common Admission Test in the Capital had to leave their centres in disappointment on Saturday as the servers crashed and some of them even could not log in. The first slot of exam at two centers, Janakpuri and Jasola in Delhi, was cancelled due to technical glitches creating panic situation and it was almost commotion among the students. The hugely competitive CAT for admission into business schools went online for the first time on Saturday.
Satish Deodhar, convener of the CAT committee of the IIMs, said the main reason for the problem was “incompatibility of some software at centers with servers”. “We are trying our best to ensure that the students are accommodated in the slots that will be held over the next 10 days. If such a thing is not possible, then one day would be added to accommodate all the students who faced a problem. Hopefully, this problem will not be repeated again,” Deodhar said.
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