My Experience With Online CAT
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom ruled by a wise king. He had numerous princesses (during those times the number of children was not an indication of wisdom). He held an annual swayamvar for some of these princesses as they came of age. The swayamvar gave the same set of tasks to the suitors and the best among the lot won the king's heart and the princesses’ hand. Suitors from far and wide congregated on one day to fight for the princesses' hand in marriage. The princesses were all exceedingly beautiful and it was a very rich kingdom (remember the king was wise and he invested wisely; no sub-prime for him, heh heh) so the swayamvar was held in very high regard across the land. Young suitors practiced for years so that on the swayamvar day they would charm the princesses. Some suitors tried every year till they succeeded. On the swayamvar day you could see a sprinkling of black hair, salt and pepper hair, white hair and even no hair. All these suitors were equally ardent in the pursuit of the ethereal princesses. This continued for a long time. (The king really had numerous princesses).
Somewhere the swayamvar itself started gaining a lot of prominence; everybody still wanted the princesses; but suitors also started participating so that they could win in the swayamvar. Winning in the swayamvar itself became a batch of honor and that added to the prestige of the princesses.
Sadly for some, age and wisdom are inversely proportional and this was particularly true for the king. Also his knees couldn't stand up to the constant standing the king had to do on the swayamvar day. So as he grew senile he realized that instead of standing for long hours on one particular day; he could stand for shorter hours for more days and thus he divided the suitors into slots. This inevitably let to different tasks for different slots and different weather conditions for different days. Suitors were disheartened because they realized that the system is not as fair as it used to be and the king being whimsical never disclosed how the final suitors were chosen across various slots. As time progressed the number of suitors decreased; the better suitors left the land and participated in other swayamvars where they thought the system was fairer. The poor princesses through no fault of their own suffered the less competent suitors and the kingdom lost its place in history...
Some of us may have realized the relevance of this story to the Common Admission Test (to strangers, CAT to friends) conducted by the IIMs. For a long time this exam was looked upon with a lot of reverence and awe by the multitude of suitors who sat for the exam every year. It was conducted on one day throughout the country and everybody attempted the same paper faced the same errors in the paper and thus stood on an equal platform before they were judged by the IIMs to be worthy of their institute.
Every year there has been atleast one error in every CAT paper; this was when the number of questions was less, around 75-90. Now with the number of questions increasing the errors will increase dramatically. The problem is not in the number of errors, the problem lies with the fact that different students will face different errors and more importantly different number of errors. Also since the number of questions has decreased the number of errors involved a higher percentage of marks.
There have been cases of power outage in some of the centers; in this case the system takes ten minutes to boot up again; students do not lose time but students actually gain some time because in those ten mins they can work on any math/ DI question that was bothering them. Remember they have a scratch paper where they have solved some questions.
Fourteen percent (50 out of 360) of the centers have been shut down from day 2. Such problems did not take place when the exam was paper based. It makes us wonder about the kind of testing that took place before the system was online. If there was any testing that took place whether it was rigorous or not is anybody's guess.
There have been a lot of other small problems, each alone not amounting to much but together it showcases how flawed the system is. Things like the cramped space for taking the exam; the absence of a proper desk on which to write on the scratch paper; the unreasonable number of hours we need to wait before the test; all of this adds to the farce that the CAT has become.
How will all this get normalized is very difficult to understand and the IIMs are not helping their cause by announcing the results on 22nd Jan. With a paper based test, it used to take them between 45-50 days to announce the result hence it is all the more surprising that with the online format they are taking the same time around 46 days; if the processes are already in place why can't the results be announced on the 15th of Dec? Or is this an experiment where the IIMs will first find out how students have scored across slots/ centers and then devise a normalization scheme that makes sense?
If the IITs can still conduct the IIT-JEE as a paper based test across the country (in various languages); then it is ironical that the country's "Premier Management Institute" cannot manage the paper based test. If I would have known this in 1996 when I applied to the IIMs I would have thought twice before learning any management from them.
We have always thought highly of this exam, earlier a lot of us would have felt that the GMAT should have been like the CAT. But in this new online avatar when people say the CAT should be more like the GMAT; I for one sadly have to agree.