CAT fiasco: 'Virtual testing of servers was must'

The company conducting the Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) Common Admission Test (CAT) examination should have opted for virtual testing of servers and the overall system before the actual test was conducted, a top official of a reputed education services company said.

"We are shocked. How can a reputed US company like Prometric go online without having a built-in redundancy system and alternate servers to take care of discrepancies," R Shivakumar, director (academics and R&D) of Bangalore-based Career Launcher, which conducts mock online CAT tests, said.

The company should had undergone a virtual testing of servers as well as the system before the tests, he said.

There were system failures at 50 exam centres yesterday. the IIMs should also had been more vigilant and done their homework, he added.

Meanwhile, the exam on Saturday was a notch easier than CAT 2008, according to students. English was difficult, but Quant was easier than the previous years, they said.

The launch of the computerised CAT involved the delivery of exams by Prometric into more than 360 testing labs at 104 locations. While a significant number of candidates completed their exams on day one, various technical problems arose at select computers in about 50 labs, preventing approximately 2,000 exams from being delivered.

Prometric had scheduled a closure of the affected labs on Sunday. Candidates affected by the closure would be notified by Prometric and provided with new appointments within this year's testing period, an IIM release said.