Protests against online CAT refuse to die down

AHMEDABAD: Though the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have declared their final merit list and gone ahead with admissions, completing the process through the first-ever online CAT, there is still a group of students putting up a protest.
Using internet and web space extensively via community, networking websites, blogs and tweets, these unhappy and unsatisfied candidates have now launched a website dedicated to bringing forth their concern.
The angry candidates — working professionals and students — have decided to move Supreme Court and hired a lawyer for this purpose.
Called ‘Protest Against CAT 2009’, this website has put up an entire list of glitches found in the test and the queries that have remained unanswered even after posting questions to the concerned offices.
Calling CAT 2009 a ‘disaster’, these inconsolable candidates have listed various points they think were loop holes and unsatisfactory during the test. “Some concerns include technical faults during the test, software problems, virus attacks, leakage of questions, candidates not being identified correctly for re-test, treatment of candidates with ‘Result Not Declared’, evaluation system and lastly the unsatisfying and random replies to the RTI applications,” said Aseem, founder of the website, who had appeared for CAT 2009.
“Many candidates used RTI to seek information, but IIMs redirected all RTI applications to Prometric. Not a single question was answered by the institutes. Candidates contacted Prometric, which took more than a week to answer the questions and wisely issued a computer-generated standard message not answering a single question posed by students,” added Aseem.
Common Admission Test (CAT) is one of the most widely taken entrance tests for management schools in the country. In 2009, the test was conducted online between November 28 and December 11, 2009.
There were numerous glitches that candidates faced in the first few days, which made the IIMs and
Prometric, the international agency appointed to conduct the test, re-schedule a second phase in February 2010.
There have been various complaints and the institute has received many RTI applications after that.