CHENNAI: Alleging large-scale irregularities in the manner in which the Common Admission Test (CAT) for admission to 13 Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) was conducted, a petition by eight candidates in Madras high court has sought a stay on the entire admission process this year.
Justice R Subbiah, before whom the petition filed by the eight IIM aspirants from Chennai came up for admission on Thursday, directed the Union human resources development ministry and IIM-Indore, which conducted the CAT 2013, to reserve one seat each to all petitioners who moved the court.
CAT is the first step for joining any of the 13 IIMs, and some other top management institutions too use the scores for their admissions. After a 20-day exercise beginning October 16 last year at 40 centres, the CAT results were published on January 14.
The petitioners assailed the examination format and said: "The computerised format of CAT 2013 was conducted over a period of 20 days and the obvious consequence of it is varying standards of difficulty. The level of difficulty was different for each slot of the testing period. The method of 'equating', 'scaling' and 'normalisation' used by the authorities to normalise the scores is unlawful and erroneous."
The process of equating and scaling, which is otherwise known as normalisation of scores, has caused grave irregularities in the scores obtained by students, the petition said.
"It has been proved that candidates who have not attempted even a single question have been awarded a percentile of 55.46 and this, in turn, implies that more than 50% of the 1.7 lakh candidates who appeared for CAT scored zero or even less."
The entire registration process, setting up test centres, compilation of questions, evaluating answers and calculation and publication of results have all been outsourced to a Gurgaon-based company, Prometric Testing Pvt Ltd.
Describing the January 14 results as shocking and illogical, the petitioners said the normalised scores of several thousand candidates were not in consonance with the number of questions attempted by them.
Citing the case of a faculty member of a coaching centre who writes CAT every year, the petition said he did not attempt any question, but had scored 165 out of 450 marks and had an overall percentile of 55.46. Alleging lack of transparency in the evaluation, they wanted the court to stay the process of admission to IIMs as well as other institutions based on CAT. They also wanted the court to quash the entire CAT 2013 held between October 16, 2013 and November 1, 2013.
(Courtesy : Times of India)
