Prometric, the agency which implemented the computer-based Common Admission Test (CAT) on behalf of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), on Monday took responsibility for the disruption during the CAT held in December last year. The company said that the disruption in 13% of the total centres during the first three days of the examinations was due to a virus attack on computers in the examination centres.
?Yes, there was a lapse and we accept responsibility for it,? said Charles Kernan, CEO, Prometric, though he refused to specify which virus were responsible for the disruption. Some of the centres were affected and candidates were issued fresh schedules, rest of the 2.16 lakh people completed the test successfully. ?There are several lessons to be learnt from this and we are looking into several aspects which can be improved,? he said.
On being asked if the company had any kind of communication with the IIMs, which are said to be reviewing their contract with the agency post the fiasco, he said ?there is no reason not to go forward for the next year?s preparation?. NIIT, an education and technology company was the delivery partner for the company where NIIT was responsible for ensuring that the systems were up and running. However, Soumitra Roy, MD, Prometric India did not put the entire blame on NIIT saying that ?the company was under our supervision?.
Roy also ruled out the possibility that CAT could go online instead of being computerised. Meanwhile, with the growing concern of candidates regarding their evaluation and CAT scores, which were released last month, the company has released the process and development of scoring of CAT 2009 online on the CAT website.
?We have reviewed the test scoring and we are completely confident that the results are appropriately distributed across the population,? Roy said.