Aspirants mull moving court

IIM Indore refuses to act

Prometric declines to admit error

Hyderabad: The controversy over the alleged rigged scores of Common Admission Test (CAT-2013) refused to die down as many aspirants who could not make it to the top B-schools are now planning to knock the courts for redressal. The aspirants have failed in their attempts to convince both the Indian Institute of Management- Indore which was the authorised institute this year to conduct the exam and the Prometric India, which has official testing agency since 2009, for a relook into the ‘software flaw’.

The candidates are now in the process of consulting legal experts whether to file the case at Indore or at Hyderabad. “We will do it shortly since the court is the only option for us to get justice. Our repeated requests at IIM-Indore went in vain” an aspirant, who prefers to be anonymous, told The Hans India.

According to Gautam Puri, the Managing Director of Career Launcher, the premiere coaching institute, both IIM Indore and Prometric India have refused to revisit the modus operandi, which hit hundreds of aspirants across the country. While the IIM Indore said that nothing wrong in the entire normalisation process, the Prometric argues the software is impeccable.

“I cannot say that this is 100% software issue. It could be a normalisation error. But what I can say is when there is a complaint and a host of aspirants have been demanding revaluation, what’s wrong in acceding to their plea?” Gautam, an alumnus of IIM Bangalore questioned.

“The basic issue here is getting 55 percentile for a blank paper is rather strange. This was probably for the first time in the annals of IIM history that such thing happened. It will not go well with the prestige of the key institutions. Fifty five per cent for no answers means the remaining people should have got less than that, i.e. minus marks. This is something which goes beyond logic,” Gautam Puri remarked.

‘This is definitely due to a technical glitch, if not a flawed software. The concerned authorities should look into the allegations and do justice,” a Professor of Osmania University felt.

“It appears that the marks of a candidate directly go to some other candidate after the valuation of blank paper. A similar thing happened during a test conducted by the APPSC for recruiting Assistant Engineers. After a series of complaints were lodged, a technical panel was formed and the error was rectified. Likewise, the IIM Indore of Prometric can order a probe and constitute a technical committee in the interest of students,” the professor opined. Though IIMs have functional autonomy, Ministry of Human Resources Development can intervene to set the record straight, according to Vamshi Krishna B, working for Accenture, who has also appeared for the test and scored low, averred.

A total of 1.72 lakh candidates had appeared for CAT 2013, India’s premiere test for admission into IIMs and B-schools. The results, however, shows that 95,000 of those appeared for CAT either scored zero marks or obtained overall negative marks. The score cards released by IIMs on January 14 shown that the candidate, who did not even answer any of the questions in the CAT paper, scored around 55 percentile. Students, who hoped to do better, were dismayed to find that they have scored much below their expectations and they sensed something wrong. Through social media, several aspirants got into contact with each other and lodged complaints at IIM Indore against the normalization procedure and also the ‘flawed software’ but of no avail.

Gautam Puri observed that one of the reasons for Prometric India not to act was from next year onwards; it is not going to conduct the exam. Tata Consultancy Services has been appointed as the next CAT testing agency. But it was yet to be announced officially.