IIMs to conduct daily CAT scan for 10 days

When the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) announced that the computer-based Common Admission Test (CAT) would be held over a period of 10 days, there was some apprehension on whether the difficulty level of the test paper would vary on different days of test. To assuage such fears, the IIMs and Prometric — the body conducting the test — are taking steps to ensure that each of the question papers in the 20 sessions of testing are of equal validity.

“Unlike last year when the test was held on a single day, this time there are in all 20 sessions and each sessions will have different question forms. We would be required to compare these forms which will need some validity and reliability checks, something similar to GRE or GMAT,” said a senior professor who is close to the development on condition of anonymity. The conducting bodies have roped in Educational Testing Service (ETS), a non-profit institution dealing in educational testing, curriculum development assets and test prep products, for quality assurance. Several psychometricians from ETS, IIMs and Prometric will conduct statistical analysis of the results and match them with the respective candidates. The IIMs and Prometric will conduct preliminary analysis of the test results continuously throughout the 10-day testing period, with each day’s data being retrieved from the testing centers and assembled for processing.

Since results for CAT will be available from January 22, 2010, computation of scores will be done between the last day of the testing window and this date. Officials from Prometric say that unlike earlier CATs where poor eraser attempts, pencil smudges and coding errors were a students' nightmare, computer-based test results would be far more accurate because they are a direct record of each candidate’s answers.

“From a scoring perspective, one of the most significant advantages of computer-based testing is the ease with which results can be imported into various software packages for analysis. With paper and pencil tests the individual answer sheets must be processed through specially designed scanners and custom software which interpret pencil marks as responses for each test question and produce an electronic test result,” said Ramesh Nava, VP & GM, Prometric.