Glitches mar Day 6 of CAT

It was the turn of the CAT test labs at Vishwakarma Government Engineering College in the city to face the troubles of the computerised CAT 2009 on the sixth day of the test, on Thursday.

One of the test labs at the college that accommodated around 30 candidates, all the computers suddenly went haywire and rebooted itself just half an hour before the test was about to end.

Talking about his experience, a candidate said on the condition of anonymity, “We were terrified. I thought the test would be rescheduled and we would probably have to give the test all over again. I don’t know what exactly went wrong, but guess it must be some sort of a virus.”

However, when the computers finally started, it resumed from where the candidates had stopped. The data was not lost; at least that was the case with the first page of the test.

Although the incident did not cause much delay, many candidates were upset with the episode. One of the 30 candidates whose computer automatically restarted said, “The computers had resumed with what we had answered in the first one and half hours. However, I could not check each and every question to see if the answers had been modified by the mechanical glitch.”

Around 50 test labs across the country got affected with the virus on the first day of the test. The problem led to rescheduling the test of around 8,000 candidates by the end of the second day. While the test labs in the three test centres in Ahmedabad went without major glitches for the first four days of the test, the LJ Institute of Management faced major problems on the fifth day, which delayed the test of around 25 candidates for two hours.