CAT registrations rise marginally by 4%

Applications from female aspirants rise

Despite slowdown in the economy, sale of vouchers and registration for Common Admission Test (CAT) 2012 have gone up marginally by 4% to 215,000 this year.

In 2011, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), owner of CAT exams, saw around 205,000 registrations.

"Sale of vouchers is marginally higher than last year. This maybe because CAT aspirants might be expecting an uptrend in economy in couple of years as well as a set of new avenues opening up in the job market," said SSS Kumar, CAT 2012 Convenor and faculty member at IIM Kozhikode (IIM-K).

Kumar added that a higher percentage of female candidates have registered for CAT 2012.

"It is encouraging to see more females coming forward this year to challenge their male counterparts in gaining admission to the IIMs," Kumar said without divulge the exact number of applications received from female aspirants.

Testing window for CAT 2012 will begin on October 11, 2012 and end on November 06, 2012.

Prometric, IIMs' partner will conduct the test. The registration window closed on September 19 midnight.

With less than a month left for CAT to kick off, Kumar said the IIMs and Prometric teams will now visit the 61 centres in 36 cities for verifying and quarantining the testing labs. "We want to ensure that the infrastructure will be same across all centres," he said.

Registrations for CAT 2012 began on 30 July and, like previous years since its conversion to computer-based testing, candidates have been scheduling for their tests online based on their preferred choice of location, date and time.

New Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune are the top cities in terms of the highest numbers of scheduled tests to date.

Apart from the 13 old and new IIMs, over 130 other B-schools across the country would be using CAT scores for admission for the academic year 2013-14.