Half-expecting it yet half-hoping against it! We do not wish to sound prophetic when we say that what happened on CAT-09 day-1 was not entirely unexpected. Neither of the 2 ‘institutions’, IIMs and Prometric, involved in conducting the CAT aroused the sort of confidence needed to give a sense of ‘everything was fine’, especially for such a significant shift in the platform for such a significant and huge exam. Apart from a couple of media interviews, filled with paeans of self-praise for Promteric’s capability and expertise in conducting an exam on such a scale, there was little evidence of actual groundwork being done at a pace that was mandatory to make it a success.
One has to understand that IIMs are institutes of academic excellence, and one can expect a degree of error from their end as conducting tests is certainly not what they excel at. CAT is perhaps ‘the exam’ in terms of the planning and execution skills required to conduct it successfully and the track record of IIMs has still not been too bad in this regard, apart from the one leak in 2003. Where IIMs still had been failing surprisingly, and consistently, was the academic part of the exam or content of the paper .. but let’s leave it for another day and come back to the more pressing present.
After bagging the several-million dollar contract, Prometric was supposed to bring in the wherewithal to generate the content, plan the application process, have the software and hardware ready, across centres, cities and the nation and do whatever else was needed to make the historical transition from the pen-paper to the computer-based format. Afterall, they had the almost impeccable GMAT track-record to boast of.
That we think was the first incorrect assumption or extension thereof. GMAT, with 2.5 lakh test takers annually across the globe, is conducted over almost 250 days and has a geographical distribution that does not really ‘test’ the load bearing capabilities of the system. Compare that to the audacious plan of having almost an equal number of aspirants write the test over a 10-day period. We are already looking at a 25-time higher load on far more concentrated resources! Imagine a plane with a capacity of 200 trying to board 5000 passengers. Little wonder then, it did not take off.
The second place where things went wrong was extending the predictable atmosphere and tested resources of the GMAT labs with that of various colleges, institutes that Prometric tied up with as test centres. It would be interesting to find out how many of the systems being used across the centres are actually genuine ones and not assembled at Nehru Place or equivalent? And how many of them use genuine original operating platform or softwares would be another guess worth taking? To expect such a widely distributed, and inadequately controlled resource system to behave in a predictable manner seems more based on hope than on reason.
But let’s keep aside the 2 arguments made above for a while and let’s assume Prometric had build the capability much beyond its GMAT experience and was genuinely ready to take on a challenge this big. The question then is where was the actual on ground preparation? Right from an edit information button installed as a reaction to the students’ vociferous demand for the same during the application, to several extensions on the edit option (the last one still operational), to the last day revelation of non-disclosure (one wonders why?) clause, to what actually transpired on the first day of CAT-2009 and right down to the startling denial mode adopted by Prometric and IIMs – it seems nothing was ever in control and Prometric has continuously been playing catch-up with the problems rather than plan and pre-empt them through multiple redundancy and contingency plans, that are a basic measure in any plan worth something.
One could have and would have pardoned a few blips in a change as big as this. The gentler souls among us would have even sympathized with Prometric and the IIMs if a few aspirants bore the brunt of some technical glitches in one of the slots and took the 2 institutes to court. But the scale of mis-management is simply too high to be brushed aside as “isolated cases of technical glitches” as claimed by the test conducting agency. There is simply no fool-proof way to compensate the students who have suffered because of what is clearly a below-par effort made by Prometric. Well, for the students ofcourse, it is not Prometric but IIMs whose credibility has come under the scanner. Finally, for all of us, CAT for the IIMs is not because of Prometric; rather, it is the other way around.
So, here we are .. again, half-hoping and half-expecting .. this time for it; that mistakes are accepted, apologized for, and rectified so that the historical shift does not become an exemplary disaster. For those who are yet to prove capable of exam-management can certainly not be expected to or entrusted with disaster management.
The author is an alumni of IITDelhi and IIM Calcutta and a founder member of Roots Education, where he anchors MBAGuru, India's fastest growing CAT coaching institute. A state-level cricketer, he is also the lyricist for India's premiere band, EUPHORIA.
The entire faculty team, who helped me, were extremely inspirational and encouraging. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that MBAGuru had a major role in shaping me as what I was at the time of the interviews. The experience has been very enlightening. The enthusiasm and optimism was contagious.
