While the CAT organisers have blamed viruses for the failure, experts suspect there are some other reasons as well for the failure.
While the CAT organisers have blamed viruses for the failure of the computerised CAT 2009 across the country, experts suspect there are some other reasons as well for the failure.
CAT gurus said some goofs may be acceptable because it was conducted only for the first time, “but the scale at which this happened is alarming.” Believing that virus were not the only reason for the problem, they said malicious programmes, poor quality of hardware and lack of preparedness may have contributed as much.
Director of TIME, Ahmedabad, Amit Agarwal said, “It is understandable that in the first year, there would be some glitches, but the scale at which things have gone wrong is shocking. It shows that they have not prepared well. Conducting a test of 17,000 candidates in a day at the same time is a huge task. However, the team which is conducting the tests does not appear to be adequately trained for an exercise of this magnitude.”
Referring to other possible reasons for the problems, Agarwal said, “This could also have happened because of the hired computer labs. Such labs would fail to meet the quality required or the configurations of the computers could be different.”
Sameer Rai, director of PT Education, Ahmedabad, said, “The virus is a part of the problem, but there are other problems as well. The organisers should have anticipated the possibility of virus infections while conducting such a prestigious test.”
“The organisers’ decision to outsource the hardware turned out to be a wrong decision as this exposed them to all kinds of computers, new and old, which might fail to fully support the test programme,” he said.
Referring to the long period of time taken by the organisers to rectify the problems, Agarwal said, “We have also conducted mock tests for several days for around 60,000 candidates across the country. The computerised process faced problems on the first day but worked successfully from the next day onwards.”
Expressing concerns for the trouble caused to the candidates, Agarwal said, “We are unhappy with the type of arrangements made by the CAT 2009 organisers. The candidates had worked so hard for the competition and their moral may have been affected. There will be a fear in their mind even when the test is rescheduled.”
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