Epiphany hit me on 28th October 2009, that I could take a chance at CAT, fortunately for me then 30th for the last date for application and I quietened down. The next I heard of it was on 9th, when 10th was the last day (after extension), either way it so happened that karma prevented me from buying a lottery worth Rs. 1400! unfortunately the 3 Lakh other students did.

Comments and relevances on how CAT 2009 was a horrible experience for most floated on every article I read, here are the few interesting ones that are suffice for a bird’s eye of the fiasco.

In CAT, a single 5 second concentration lapse can cost you 5%ile! And all such disturbances definitely caused me at least 4 – 5 concentration lapses!

from Youth Curry

Each had their own account to share. While for some, the problem began with the system rejecting their password, others reported the screen going blank. Some others had to contend with screens where words appeared but pictures went missing. This was not all. Some students suffered a setback while proceeding with the test, which ended abruptly after they answered three/four questions. Abhinav, a student from PGDAV, said, “My computer hung for 10 minutes and it unnerved me. Even if we are offered a second opportunity, we can never approach it with the same attitude with which we had come prepared.” – TOI

The server crashes at various test centers made much noise and news in the media, coupled with the almost inconvinient constraints put up on the test takers. Arrival at least 2 hours in advance, no adequate water or restroom facilities for 5 hours at a stretch, erring test application that either died on someone or closed upon will (by mistake of course!). The margin that Prometric left for student erorrs in amazing and equally amazing the time they spent rectifying it, opening and closing the “edit” link in the registration forms online. (see here).

Prometric not only messed up CAT 2009 per say but is also is the direct cause of ripples of problem caused by the main event going awry. Many recall the torture of having to take the test rescheduled and if they came travelled from a distant city to take this test? Well, they are to make good of it on their own as far as additional boarding and lodging expenses for the extended stay goes. Even more, Prometric expected students to pull a la superman stunt by scheduling retests in a day or two in different cities (see here).

Press releases from Prometric were nothing more than a soothing balm applied on the burn that many had to bite their cheeks and endure without much options but we are talking at minimum graduate students here, and anyone with basic common sense can catch the covering up act in Prometric’s words…

The result files produced during an exam are encrypted prior to being written to disk. This procedure enhances the security of the content and provides a degree of protection from virus infection and/or destruction. Any such tampering with the files would be detected when the test results are imported into the data processing system and subsequent item analysis.

To which a commenter on Youth Curry blog reasoned thus…

Some viruses write random data on the hard disk sectors and can literally corrupt any file type. I don’t think some viruses are “so nice” that they look at a file format and then decide to corrupt it. But, what would non technical people know about such things ? They are busy teaching their students about looting others money and then shamefully waiting for a bailout!!

Also,

For a country like India, which boasts of its IT prowess, Saturday’s test failure has thrown up uncomfortable and embarrassing questions. However, Soumitra Roy, director, Prometric (one of the test organisers), dismissed it as a case of “isolated technical issues.”

Implementation of a secure Operating System (hint hint something non-windows) nationwide is an almost impossible task, especially so for this event (across 32 cities), so they decided to bite the bullet and go ahead using what they had on hands anyway – Windows. Its about time that the nation wakes to the fact that there is no way Windows even in the near future can be secure, heck, viruses are written for Windows. Another area they failed terribly at was scaling, scaling the software for 3 lakh students designated to take the vital exam that was to decide their career’s course.

It’s very uncertain how correct are the results of the test taken stored in Prometric’s “propreitery” file types, so here we are having nothing to do but wait, will the next batch of nation’s entreprenuers and managers be the creme of the intellect that IIM’s intend to take in everytime? or shall it be a case of collective good luck of a few thousand individuals?

If you have any relevant CAT 2009 experience to share, please word them all in the comments below!