Common Admission Test (CAT) is to be held online from November 2009. The decision will impact thousands of students who appear for the highly competitive entrance exam at centres across the country in the hope of scoring high enough to make it to one of the IIMs.
The exam will have to be conducted in staggered batches within a window period of a few months. The other change will be that instead of the current single exam paper, the online test will have several different papers of the same level of difficulty.
The online model will be similar to US exams like the GMAT (Graduate Management Aptitude Test) and the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) except that the results will not appear instantly.
Asish Bhattacharyya, admissions chairperson at IIM Calcutta, said that an online system would "help us handle the huge number of students appearing for the test every year. Last year the number crossed 2.3 lakh". This number is only expected to increase with projections of three lakh-plus in 2009.
The process of conducting the exam—including processing the results and reporting the scores—will be outsourced to a private service provider who has prior experience in online tests. "But the IIMs will retain complete control over the test," said an official.
Bhattacharyya, however, insists that every security precaution will be taken while conducting the exam.
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