CAT IIM 2009 - THE IIM WAY OF MANAGEMENT !

The Common Admission Test (CAT) for entrance into IIMs for MBA, beginning academic year 2009 had really gone into rough weathers with the online Prometric exam going haywire in almost all centres. Central HRD Minister Kapil Sibal had lambasted the way at which the horrible mistakes had been continuing for the past four days and had ordered an enquiry into the whole affair. The Online exam co-ordinating institute, IIM Ahmedabad’s Director Prof. Sameer Barua had accepted that the selection committee had erred in doing the whole process thru Prometric. The COO of Prometric had put the whole blame to some unknown virus. The passing the buck had started. Finally the villain will be the un-known Virus! The story will end there to everyone’s delight and all will live happily ever after. Only in India will such cases pass!

As a person associated in IT industry for close to 3 decades, I am convinced that the problems are not because of virus but due to capability issues of Prometric company. While it is the king in the Online exam sphere, I am sure the company would not have ever done any such mammoth test as CAT in its history. Without self assessing the capability to do, this huge task, to be done within the time frame and without doing any trial run, the company had fallen down due to the incapability of its systems to handle the load. For everything, now there is a virus to blame! As a tech company, Prometric must be ashamed of itself to blame the virus for the fiasco.

There is another animal behind the story and it is NIIT. Its competencies run in training and not in online examinations. I understand that it is NIIT the lead bidder of the case with infrastructure coming from Prometric. The expectation of success is way off the mark and it had been tested at the expense of hapless students.

Now let me tell you my experience. My daughter was a candidate to write CAT 2009. Her centre was SRM University Chennai. I had promised her to visit her at Chennai and take her to the exam centre which I did today. Her test time scheduled was today afternoon. Though the test starts at 3.30 pm, students were advised to report two hours before schedule which we did promptly. Since one has been reading about the difficulties that Prometric was facing from the d day, I have been following newspapers, CAT IIM web site, Prometric Website and their contact points about any change in the exam schedule. Having not seen or heard anything adversary only did I take the train from Cochin to Chennai to take my daughter to the test site.

Little did we anticipate that we were in for trouble! There were three batches of fifty students each to undergo the test. Two batches were admitted and the third batch was asked to wait. Wait they did endlessly. After about two hours, a person by name Albert Joseph, who claimed to be centre in-charge, called these waiting students and told them hat they had earlier sent s m s & email to these students about rescheduling their exams. It was an out and out lie. Had that been the case, the students should have been told so at the time they reported. The fact is that none of the students had received any s m s or email. At quarter to four PM they were asked to leave by being told that they would be informed the new schedule in the due course. Needless to add, my daughter was one of them.

I was standing aside watching the whole show. This person Albert, had no remorse about telling the hapless students to go way and expect for another communication. In fact he was full of arrogance and showing it off on the anxious students who were numb with shock. Just see this, in my daughters case she had bunked the regular studies to attend the test. The centre is located close to fifty kilometers away from the city. The frustrating experience could have added its own negative impact on the mind. I am sure it would be the same with all the affected students. When I went to talk to the centre in-charge, he avoided me totally telling that he has nothing to do with the parents!

Who is bothered in this country? The ministers, the educationalists or the academicians? No one! It is just another fiasco. That’s it. They are so used to such mess-ups. Everyone will simply pass the blame on others.

The famous IIMs again had proven that they are good at theory and not the practice. If they really were good at the practice, they definitely should not have let this happen. And let it continue for four succeeding days! How can anyone decide the whole online thing without ever testing it? The NIIT and the Prometric had over shown its capabilities to misguide the decision makers. Thus the first ever online CAT had turned into a huge failure with aspiring candidates all over the country suffering!

What do we call this fiasco? The ‘IIM way of Management’? You would all laugh I am sure, but I cannot, for I am an affected parent.