After a two-year fall in those taking their computer-based Common Admission Test (CAT) for entry, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have recorded a 0.5 per cent increase in the number of registrations this year. This, however, is much below their expectation of around 10 per cent more.
The CAT 2011 registration window ended on Tuesday, with 205,000 aspirants registering. Of these, 73 per cent were male. This marginally exceeds last year’s registrations of 204,000. In 2008, around 276,000 aspirants appeared for CAT, which fell to 240,000 in 2009.
Janakiraman Moorthy, convener, CAT 2011, and faculty member at IIM, Calcutta, had earlier told Business Standard that given the Indian economic condition, the IIMs expected a five to 10 per cent rise in applications this year.
The expectation was also due to the fact that many other B-schools had decided to accept CAT scores as admission criteria. Last month, for admission to their B-schools, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) decided to do away with their decade-old examination, the Joint Management Entrance Test, and accept CAT results instead. So would 10 other non-IIM schools, pushing the total number of non-IIM institutes accepting CAT scores to 165.
With this, the importance of CAT has substantially increased for students. According to a student of a premier B-School, “The CAT has not remained a good indicator of a student’s potential, with statistical normalisation and the exam becoming easier over the years. Institutes’ growing reliance on CAT scores can and will severely hamper incoming student quality.”
While B-schools registering with IIMs to use CAT scores pay a first-time fee of Rs 2.5 lakh, regular B-schools pay Rs 2 lakh per annum.
This year, CAT will be conducted under a new format, with only two sections instead of three. The first section will focus on quantitative ability and data interpretation; the second on verbal ability and logical reasoning. There will be separate time limits. The examination will be for 140 minutes, where candidates will have 70 minutes to answer 30 questions within each section, which will have an on-screen countdown timer. Once the time ends for the first section, they will move to the second and will no longer be able to go back.
“With the introduction of the new format, we want to see how it helps candidates to focus on specific content. Under the new format, candidates can concentrate on whichever section they are working on and it won’t give an undue advantage to candidates strong in a particular section,” said Moorthy.
Owing to this change in format, engineering students, usually struggling in the verbal ability section, are happy to have logical reasoning to bank upon. Similarly, humanities students, having their usual trouble with quantitative aptitude, find data interpretation a possible back-up.
Three new cities – Bhilai, Jammu and Dehradun – have been added to the previous 33 test locations. The cities in which the highest numbers of candidates have been scheduled to test are New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune.
