CAT results out, questions remain

The much-awaited results of the online Common Admission Test (CAT) were declared on Sunday by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). Owing to the technical glitches, during the test and the result when the IIM site crashed for a few hours, the candidates have had to face a tough time. However, the students are still unable to rest easy. The reason — lack of clarity on the marking scheme. “I have scored very low in the Quant section even though I had attempted all the questions and was confident of my answers,” said Madhvan Chary from Thane, “The IIMs have not revealed anything about their negative marking scheme, marks per questions, etc.”

Every year, the marking scheme for the CAT exam is announced to help students strategise during the exam. This time there were no guidelines and candidates claim they are clueless as to how they have been evaluated.

“My score card only reveals marks per section and full score along with percentile,” said another Kurla resident Bhavesh Khanapurkar,. “We had assumed that the IIMs will eventually announce their marking scheme. There is no justification for the low scores.”

The IIMs claim they have used a psychometric evaluation system to assess the candidates. “Prometric and the IIMs have followed industry standard procedures to evaluate the answers,” said Soumitra Roy, managing director, India, Prometric. “This consists of a combination of computer analysis and the application of psychometric expertise to ensure fairness and validity of the test results.”

According to Arks Srinivas, director of Triumphant Institute of Management Education (TIME), the system sued by the IIMs cannot be applied here as students were not given different set of questions and several students had more time to prepare creating an unfair advantage.

Parag Chitale, founder-director of Chitales’ Personalised Learning Centre (CPLC), a management training institute, felt that unless clarification is issued by IIMs on the evaluation procedure, the scores will seem unjustified to students. “Candidates are completely clueless as how the normalisation was done by the IIMs. Unless transparency is maintained, the test will lose its credibility,” he said.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/academy/report_cat-results-out-questions-remain_1354090