So it seems like December 8 will not be the concluding day of the CAT 2009 after all. According to an IIM Ahmedabad press statement, “There are still some candidates who could not take the test due to genuine reasons and test has not been rescheduled for them. A new test date will be announced in about a fortnight to provide an opportunity to ALL such candidates to write the test. Prometric would inform all such candidates about the date and the venue for the test.”
At a press conference at IIM Ahmedabad today, Director Prof Samir Barua said that while 1.85 lakh candidates had taken the exam till Dec 6, another 30,000 took the test today (Dec 7) and about 15,000 to 20,000 will take the test on Dec 8.
Explaining the causes for the failure of the exam at some testing labs over the weekend, Prof Barua said that some individual labs in Lucknow and Hyderabad had failed to send the test data back to the central servers. “The central server is a cluster of 30 to 40 computers that monitor logs for east test across India,” he explained.
Meanwhile, hammered by rising doubts over the integrity of CAT 2009 in the wake of the virus attack on the first two days of the test, Prometric posted a note on the www.catiim.in website claiming that the result files of CAT 2009 were safe. Quoting the note verbatim below:
“Candidates at various locations experienced different technical difficulties that were related to the viruses. Prometric is currently reviewing the experiences of all the candidates that might have been impacted by computer viruses and/or other sources of potential disruption. One of the key advantages of computer-based delivery is the ability to electronically record a candidate’s exam and identify issues that might affect an individual’s performance. That assessment is already underway and with the consent of the IIMs, Prometric will be offering a new test to the candidates who were impacted in this way.
The vast majority of virus programs are written to work with or corrupt commonly available file formats, such as executable files, and exploit functionality in commonly available applications such as e-mail programs, internet browsers, and operating systems. The proprietary result files used by Prometric fall outside the scope of what a typical virus is capable of attacking, thereby vastly reducing the risk of exposure to these viruses.
The result files produced during an exam are encrypted prior to being written to disk. This procedure enhances the security of the content and provides a degree of protection from virus infection and/or destruction. Any such tampering with the files would be detected when the test results are imported into the data processing system and subsequent item analysis.
To date, Prometric’s ongoing event reconciliation processes have verified that no results have been deleted or modified by a virus attack. The majority of sites and candidates have tested without incident and their performance indicates that most candidates had a valid and fair experience.”
(With inputs from rajaramvarun in Ahmedabad)