April 29th, 2009 at 4:10 pm

CAT has become online

Now its official, CAT has become online. The Common Admission Test (CAT) is an all-India test conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) as an entrance exam for the management programmes of its 7 B schools. About 250,000 students took CAT in 2008 for around 1500 seats in the IIMs. This is the reason why, CAT is often considered as the one of the toughest competitive entrance examination. CAT is multiple-choice based with negative-mark penalties for wrong answers, and traditionally comprises three sections that span the domains of arithmetical problem solving, geometry, statistics, data interpretation, logical reasoning, puzzles, and English language skills. The written test is the first step for admission to the IIMs.

After the test, the IIMs declare exam scores and put up a list of candidates who are eligible for the next stage of a group discussion and an individual interview. The scores are relative and are calculated on a percentile basis for individual sections as well as for the total. This week, IIM Bangalore announced that from 2009 onwards, CAT would be a Computer Based Test. Prometric ETS was selected as the partner in conducting the online test. This year, CAT will be conducted over a 10-day period at the end of the year. The details on online CAT will be released by the end of May. According to the experts and leading CAT coaching centres, now the CAT pattern will be similar to that of the GMAT and GRE.

This is official Press Release by IIM Bangalore ::

The Common Admission Test (CAT) of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Indore, Kozhikode, Lucknow, and Shillong is going to be a Computer Based Test (CBT) from this year onwards. The test will be conducted in a window of about ten days sometime at the end of the calendar year. CBT CAT will be a candidate friendly test in terms of flexibility in the selection of test date, ease of registration process, better physical environment and test experience, and enhanced security in terms of biometric identification of candidates and video monitoring. CBT format also would improve communication between candidates and IIMs in terms of programme information, test delivery, receipt of admit cards, and receipt of score reports.

IIMs have been conducting CAT in paper-&-pencil format for the last 33 years. This test is reputed to be the toughest entrance test for management and business schools worldwide. With growing student aspirations to undertake management education, the number of candidates appearing for CAT has been increasing manifold. While about 95,000 candidates took CAT in 2003, the number rose to about 250,000 in 2008 indicating a rise of a whopping 163 percent. This has resulted in severe strain on the administrative system of IIMs to conduct CAT in its existing format.

CBT is a natural culmination of the modernization CAT has undergone. In the late 1960s, multiple choice questions (MCQ), an educational testing innovation, was introduced for the first time in the entrance examinations of IIMs. Later, in the late 1970s, entrance tests of different IIMs were merged to form CAT. In the late 1980s, another technology feature was introduced in the form of optical machine reading (OMR) of the answer-sheets.

Today, CAT is poised to take a CBT format comparable to the existing tests such as GMAT, GRE, and TOEFL but at substantially lower cost. IIMs have selected Prometric ETS after a very elaborate search process to be their partner in delivering the computer-assisted CAT. More details will be available on the computerized CAT along with the advertisement for CAT to be released later this summer.

Some of the more prominent colleges which accept CAT scores for admission are: