Govt to meet IIM directors on CAT fiasco

Unhappy over thousands of students failing to write the Common Admission Test (CAT) due to technical problems, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) is meeting directors of Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) on Wednesday to discuss its concerns.

“The IIM directors are meeting the newly appointed higher education secretary Vibha Puri Das on Wednesday to discuss the CAT issue,” said an official.

The ministry had earlier sought a report from CAT 2009 convenor Satish Deodhar on the technical problems that hampered the test that was conducted over a span of 11 days.

“We have already ordered an enquiry into the matter but we can’t give an opinion now. We are very concerned about this because a large number of students have been put to inconvenience because of this. Adequate care should have been taken in this regard and we hope that this is not repeated again,” Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal earlier told Business Standard.

For CAT 2009, the IIMs originally had a 10-day testing period from November 28 to December 7, which was extended by a day. Prometric, the US company that conducted CAT 2009, has rescheduled exams for more than 17,000 affected candidates. Nearly 215,000 candidates successfully took the CAT this year, according to Prometric.