11 CAT centres fail online test

Major technical glitches were reported on day one of the computerised Common Admission Test. CAT institutes said around 11 CAT centres crashed in nine cities. The test centres said the exam could not begin owing to failure of the server. Computerised CAT will be spread over 10 days and held across 32 cities.

Around 200 students are reported to be affected. 2.41 lakh students registered for CAT 2009 exams.

The centres which faced the technical snag include, SRM University, Chennai; Venkateswara College and Garden City College in Bangalore; DEIT, Bhopal; Heritage Institute of Technology and EIILM at Kolkata; Saraswathy college of Engineering, Mumbai and at the College of Engineering, Pune. In Chandigarh, Rayat and Bahra Biotechnology Center of Excellence and one of the CAT centres in Lucknow has also been affected.

“According to reports, the Janakpuri centre in New Delhi, faced major problems where the passwords and usernames of the test takers were not working. Many test takers in the test centres at Chandigarh saw their passwords being not accepted by the systems and in some of the cases the systems were working too slowly,” TIME, a test preparing institute said in a statement.

Soumitra Roy, Managing Director, India, Prometric, the official agency responsible for conducting the computer based CAT said, "CAT 2009 has certainly not been cancelled in any of the test centres. In fact, thousands of tests were successfully delivered in hundreds of test centres throughout India. To accommodate the maximum number of candidates, Prometric and IIMs delayed the start of the morning session by about half-an-hour. As a result of isolated technical issues some candidates are being rescheduled and provided a new appointment via email and SMS."