CAT throws up 16 joint toppers

New Delhi, Dec. 27: Sixteen students have jointly topped this year’s Common Admission Test, conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management for admission to their postgraduate programmes.

Students, however, complained that the IIM-run website that shows the results was slow throughout the day and they sometimes needed 10 to 15 attempts to learn their ranks.

Some 1.68 lakh candidates had taken the test, held across 307 centres on November 16 and 22. IIM Indore, which coordinated the test this year, announced the results today.

Rohit Kapoor, the convener of the test, said about 4,000 seats would be on offer at the 13 existing and six proposed IIMs, with the latter group expected to start operating from the next academic session that begins in July.

The new IIMs are to be opened in Bihar, Odisha, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. The Centre has picked the locations of three of them and is deciding the sites for the rest.

IIM Andhra Pradesh will be located in Visakhapatnam while IIM Odisha will come up in Bhubaneswar and IIM Himachal in Sirmaur. Maharashtra and Punjab have not yet suggested any sites.

Bihar has proposed Gaya but the Centre prefers Patna because Gaya’s airport functions only seasonally when Buddhist tourists come from Southeast Asia.

On the basis of scores in the Common Admission Test, known by the acronym CAT, the IIMs will call students to a group discussion and an interview before drawing up the admission list around April.

Some 80 other private B-Schools too admit students through this test. These include the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai; Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad; Birla Institute of Management Technology (Bimtech), Greater Noida; and the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon.

About 1.95 lakh students had registered for the test while 1.68 lakh took it. Bimtech director H. Chaturvedi said many “non-serious” students register and then drop out.

Kapoor said the details of the examinees’ gender-wise and region-wise performances were not available yet.

Last year, 1.73 lakh candidates had taken the test, conducted between October 16 and November 11, with the American firm Prometric providing technical support and handling the logistics for the computer-based test. This year, Tata Consultancy Services got the contract.

Eight students had top-scored last year.

Each examinee is given a percentile score by dividing the number of students below him or her with the total number that took the test, and multiplying the ratio by 100.

So, if 80 per cent of the examinees scored fewer marks than a particular candidate, that candidate’s percentile score is 80. For the highest scorer(s), the percentile score is rounded off to 100 but the rest may get theirs in decimal fractions.