As is known by all that CAT 2009’s online version started on November 28, 2009. Technical glitches and test being rescheduled was a common feature across the centers in cities like Delhi, Lucknow, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai amongst the others with hundreds of students affected by the process. Rescheduling CAT has brought with it more worries as a lot of students arranged important official meetings, presentations, onsite visits and other engagements for that one date with CAT, which now has been flipped about.
Though there are genuine reasons for students who could not take the test to be concerned, however, going by the people we talked to and the discussions on the PaGaLGuY forums, there are more reasons for the students who were able take their exam to worry. Below are some of them.
a) Candidates have been asked to come to centers two hours before the exam. The security check-ins took ages, and sometimes the server did not start on time. All this waiting marred the performance of the candidate during the exam.
b) The staff was uncooperative. Gaurav Gupta, a student of BITS-Pilani who took the test on November 28, 2009 at Maharishi Arvind Institute of Engineering and Technology, Pilani says,
“Officials were chatting and discussing amongst themselves throughout the paper. One of the officials even had his mobile phone kept on charging inside our test center and it rang twice during the paper. They kept moving around from one room to another and there was absolutely no silence during the paper. The worse part was the door connecting the two rooms which made an irritating noise every time it was opened and closed. My request to keep the door open by placing a stopper so that we could do away with the noise was rejected outright by one of the officials without any clarification. The officials were absolutely unconcerned about the fact that they were making so much noise in the room and in spite of request by a lot of students they kept doing the same.”
c) Many candidates claim that the review button did not work for them.
d) The computers shut down in the middle of the test. Thus, some candidates got unfair time to solve questions that they were stuck with during the time the computers were being fixed.
CAT is supposed to bring out the best candidates who would later go on to join the best management institutes of the country. I wonder if such kind of testing, which favors a candidate’s luck and the chances of his being at a ‘better’ center more than his preparation will bring out the deserving candidates. While those who have been rescheduled can hope for improved and glitch free testing center, those who have already taken the test can only wish that the authorities concerned would take the necessary steps to neutralize the unfairness of the test. Till then, we can do with wishing that the remaining days of the first ever online CAT go trouble free.