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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

CAT website glitches to be rectified by September 18

CAT website glitches to be rectified by September 18

MBA aspirants are slowly getting accustomed to the practicality of the Common Admission Test (CAT) going online this year. Many who had registered online for the 2009 edition of the exam conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) were agitated last week after they could not call back the form when a mistake crept in and were asked to buy another form by shelling out Rs 1,400.

Following a TOI report last week pointing out the glitches in the online system, authorities are now adding features to the CAT registration and scheduling website to make it more user-friendly. Candidates will be able to make changes or correct errors in the forms from the evening of September18.

CAT chairman Sathish Deodhar said: “From September 18, students who have made mistakes while filling up the form can call back their forms any number of times and make necessary corrections.”

Said a B Com final-year student in a city college, Naresh G, “I had got my mailing address wrong. I realised it only later and was so upset that my parents got me a new voucher for Rs 1,400. I registered again under a new user name.”

There is good news for students like Naresh as well. They will be refunded the money they spent on the second voucher, but they will have to fill an online request form.

As the test can be taken any day from November 28 to December 7, many candidates across the country wanted to take the last slots. Robert Sekar, taking a second shot at CAT, said, “I picked the December 6 slot because I figured it would give me a few more days to prepare. Also, I will be able to get more inputs from my friends who are taking the test on earlier dates.”

Academics who have been following the test for long said that students should not worry about what slot they got. “Many students think the last few slots will have easier questions. There’s no logic behind such assumptions. The IIMs will prepare 20 different papers and each will have about the same difficulty level,” said Gautam Puri, vice-chairman, Career Launcher.

Meanwhile many students who had a go at the demo test papers on the site were also apprehensive about it. They said that though the interface allowed them to change the answer option it did not have an unmark’ option.

MBA aspirant Shrija Janus said, “The problem is that if we are unsure about the answer we cannot unmark’ it, so there’s the risk of scoring negative marks.” Others said that as the questions are not lined up on one screen and there was no ready reckoner, every time they had to look up a question they had to go back several screens.

source: Times of India

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