CAT is now CBT

Dear CAT aspirants,

CAT is going to be CBT from this year.IIMS have announced that on 1st july 2009. The test will be conducted in a window of about 10 days, towards the end of the year. Click here to see the official communication of T.I.M.E. with the IIMs.

The Common Admission Test (CAT) of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at

Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Indore, Kozhikode, Lucknow, and Shillong is going to be a

Computer Based Test (CBT) from this year onwards. The test will be conducted in a window

of about ten days sometime at the end of the calendar year. CBT CAT will be a candidatefriendly

test in terms of flexibility in the selection of test date, ease of registration process,

better physical environment and test experience, and enhanced security in terms of

biometric identification of candidates and video monitoring. CBT format also would improve

communication between candidates and IIMs in terms of programme information, test

delivery, receipt of admit cards, and receipt of score reports.

IIMs have been conducting CAT in paper-&-pencil format for the last 33 years. This test is

reputed to be the toughest entrance test for management and business schools worldwide.

With growing student aspirations to undertake management education, the number of

candidates appearing for CAT has been increasing manifold. While about 95,000

candidates took CAT in 2003, the number rose to about 250,000 in 2008 indicating a rise of

a whopping 163 percent. This has resulted in severe strain on the administrative system of

IIMs to conduct CAT in its existing format.

CBT is a natural culmination of the modernization CAT has undergone. In the late 1960s,

multiple choice questions (MCQ), an educational testing innovation, was introduced for the

first time in the entrance examinations of IIMs. Later, in the late 1970s, entrance tests of

different IIMs were merged to form CAT. In the late 1980s, another technology feature was

introduced in the form of optical machine reading (OMR) of the answer-sheets. Today, CAT

is poised to take a CBT format comparable to the existing tests such as GMAT, GRE, and

TOEFL but at substantially lower cost.