10% students affected in first 3 days of CAT tech glitch

Around 7 to 8,000 students (or 10-11%) sitting for the computerised Common Admission Test 2009 were affected by technical failures during the first three days and unable to complete the exam.

Around 62% of these students have been rescheduled and the rest will be informed about their readjusted time slots in the days to come, said Professor Samir Barua, Director, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

“We recognise and empathise with their inconvenience but it has to be understood that it's a fact of life and has to be dealt with,” he said. Many of the students travelled to other cities in order to give the exam. An unexpected attack by viruses such as Conflicker and W32.NIMDA lead to the breakdown in many of the 361 labs across 104 centers and the process of recognising and quarantining the centers against such attacks is in process, according to Prof Barua.

“On the first day, around 47 labs remained shut and on the second day 33. We expect to reopen more and more labs as the days go by,” he said. Some centers faced hardware break down and power failure despite back ups, said Prof Barua, without sharing details of the technical aspects of the glitches.

“To conduct a test for 2,50,000 students in a 10 day window is a tremendous undertaking even for us and we had taken a series of precautions to increase layers of protection for the examination content as well as biometric security. But we were unable to get all the viruses out and had to go back to each individual lab to fix them. We are in the process of further isolating the systems from the networks and changing access and control system's vulnerability,” said Mr Charles Karnan, Chief Operating Officer, Prometric. Prometric has successfully converted tests such as GRE and TOEFL from paper and pen format to CBT worldwide. NIIT is partnering Prometric in conducting and delivering the test. He added that they had been toying with the idea of not using the public infrastructure but hiring 17,000 computers to conduct the test, but the sheer scale of the undertaking would not allow that.

IIMs will not go back to the pen and paper format but will continue to conduct the computer-based CAT, assured Prof Satish Deodhar, CAT Convenor. If required, the duration of the 10 day window of the test might be extended, said Prof Barua. This would not delay the final selection process, he added. In the first three days, more than 50,000 students of the scheduled 70,000 have taken the test successfully.