Students are rushing to secure their preferred time slots to take the Common Admission Test (CAT) to enter the country’s premier business schools as the joint management entrance test (JMET) of the IITs and Mudra Institute of Communications’ exams being scrapped and reports of Faculty of Management Studies’ entrance exam meeting the same fate doing rounds.
This is corroborated by the fact that almost two-thirds of total capacity for CAT 2011 has already filled up and most of the registrations have happened in the last few days.
This is interesting as still there are 20 more days left for candidates to register for the exam and the company has had to add capacity as seats are filling up fast.
??In order to offer convenience to as many candidates as possible, Prometric has built in the flexibility of adding testing seats where necessary during the registration window. Within the first three weeks of registration, we have added seats in 8 locations as they were filling up fast,? said Prometric India?s MD Soumitra Roy. Prometric is the US-based testing agency which has been conducting the computer based CAT for the last two years.
The company has added capacity in Bhilai, Dehradun, Cochin, Kozhikode, Jamshedpur, Guwahati, Vishakhapatnam and Hyderabad of which Bhilai was a new city added this year. Incidentally, most of these towns are near the new Indian Institutes of Management.
??Till date, including the seats allocated for contingency purpose, we have already filled two-thirds of the total capacity. We will continue to monitor and adjust capacity but this will become difficult as we approach the end of the registration window,? Roy added.
CAT 2011 is to be conducted in a span of 20 days from October 22 to November 18 2011 and will have only two sections instead of three. The examination will be 140 minutes and candidates have 70 minutes to answer 30 questions within each section which will have an on-screen countdown timer. Once the time ends for the first section, they will move to the second and will no longer be able to go back. Moreover, a 15-minute tutorial will be provided before the start of the test. The total duration will be two hours and 35 minutes including the tutorial. CAT 2010 was taken by 2.04 lakh students.
?I would urge candidates to register as early as possible to avoid the last minute rush or disappointment of not getting their preferred dates or location,? advised Roy.