Ahmedabad, Aug 9th: Hundreds and thousands of students aspiring to get into the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) will now be answering the Common Admission Test (CAT) online from this year onwards, IIM-A officials said. IIMs till now have been conducting CAT in traditional paper format for the last 33 years. The CAT scores not only determine admission into the IIMs, but also to several other reputed management institutes. According to the statement, the test will be conducted in a window of about 10 days at the end of the year.


The institutes claim that the computer based CAT will be candidate-friendly, flexible in the selection of test date, ease registration process, provide better physical environment and test experience, and enhanced security in terms of biometric identification of candidates and video monitoring. But experts from training and coaching centers are worried about how this may affect the students' preparation. "The content of the exam is not likely to be much different. Still, the fact that it will be on the computer will affect the preparation of students," Shiva Kumar of Career Launcher told sources. The coaching centers are also troubled that the format of questions is still unclear. "Questions could appear one by one or all at once - this is unclear still," said an official.