How Good the online CAT really is?
Well, let me apologize to the CEans outside India for writing on a India specific topic. This post is about the Common Admission Test or CAT that is conducted by Indian Institutes of Management for entire into B-Schools across India. This exam is supposed to be one of the toughest exams in the world.
#-Link-Snipped-#Couple of years back CAT went online and instead of the third Sunday of November the exam now is held over a span of 3-5 weeks at online centers. Well I must thank God that I was already in my second year of MBA when CAT went online but I think the IIMs for once have got something completely wrong when they decided to take CAT online. First of all, when the level of competition is so stiff ,when people lose out on a great B-school by 0.01 percentile or even less, or just one wrong answer can change your fortunes would you really want people to have different question papers? For a lot of candidates CAT is question of their life, would you really leave something to chance if it is about your life?
No system could be full proof but that doesn't mean that we start going away from perfection. The erstwhile CAT where everyone had the same set of questions was much fairer. There were still problems like ambiguous answer choices open to different interpretations by different scholars and misprints in some question sets still it was more fair than this one where your scores are normalized based on performance of people taking the exam on that very day. Why do they make all the athletes run at once in Olympics why don't they ask each runners to run one after another and calculate their timings? Saving time of the organizers is not the only logic behind this. True spirit of any competition is that everyone has equal opportunity and same set of challenges.
Some people would say that in Cricket the side batting first/second gets advantage but then Cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties but CAT should be able to predict with some certainty that which one of the candidates was better on the day. I think going the GMAT way the IIMs have killed the CAT. With more and more unpredictability in results creeping in the CAT seems to have become more of a lottery than a great entrance exam that it used to be
#-Link-Snipped-#Couple of years back CAT went online and instead of the third Sunday of November the exam now is held over a span of 3-5 weeks at online centers. Well I must thank God that I was already in my second year of MBA when CAT went online but I think the IIMs for once have got something completely wrong when they decided to take CAT online. First of all, when the level of competition is so stiff ,when people lose out on a great B-school by 0.01 percentile or even less, or just one wrong answer can change your fortunes would you really want people to have different question papers? For a lot of candidates CAT is question of their life, would you really leave something to chance if it is about your life?
No system could be full proof but that doesn't mean that we start going away from perfection. The erstwhile CAT where everyone had the same set of questions was much fairer. There were still problems like ambiguous answer choices open to different interpretations by different scholars and misprints in some question sets still it was more fair than this one where your scores are normalized based on performance of people taking the exam on that very day. Why do they make all the athletes run at once in Olympics why don't they ask each runners to run one after another and calculate their timings? Saving time of the organizers is not the only logic behind this. True spirit of any competition is that everyone has equal opportunity and same set of challenges.
Some people would say that in Cricket the side batting first/second gets advantage but then Cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties but CAT should be able to predict with some certainty that which one of the candidates was better on the day. I think going the GMAT way the IIMs have killed the CAT. With more and more unpredictability in results creeping in the CAT seems to have become more of a lottery than a great entrance exam that it used to be
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