Entrance Exams Under the Weather

Desicritics.org: Entrance Exams Under the Weather

May 30, 2010
mad_bong

The IITs and IIMs have for long been counted above the rest in the league of
premier institutes of higher learning in India. A significant reason behind
their global recognition is the quality of the students who get into the
them. In fact, the IITs are widely acknowledged as the most difficult
institutes to get into with an applicant to seat ratio of around 100:1.
The same can be said about the IIMs. The CAT and the IITJEE are arguably two
most fiercely competitive examinations in the world. Instituted with the
purpose of filtering students for admission into these prestigious
varsities, both these examinations have repeatedly tried reinventing
themselves to ensure that only the best go through. Over the course of the last few months, however, both these examinations have faced a crisis of credibility.

The 2009 installment of the Common Admission Test (CAT) was the first to be
conducted online. The examinations were however mired with numerous
issues. The problems started with the registration procedure itself. The web
interface developed by Prometric for applicants to enter their personal
details was far from foolproof. The examinations themselves were plagued with
technical issues. On the very first day of the examinations, a number of
students were unable to appear for their test due to crashing of examination servers and other technical issues. Similar problems persisted during the entire period of the examination. Besides, applicants also pointed out that questions were being repeated across different slots of the test and some of them were being copied verbatim from previous CAT papers. Demands were made for a retest even before all the candidates had taken the examination. The IIMs dismissed suggestions of a retest and instead offered only "wronged" candidates another shot at the CAT. For most genuinely affected candidates, this attempt at a fix was far from satisfactory.

The IITJEE examinations too have been in the news for the wrong reasons more than once over the years. Questions were raised by IIT Professors themselves over the cutoffs in the 2006 IITJEE paper. The IITJEE has always been a subject trauma for candidates owing to its soaring difficulty levels. The 2010 IITJEE was a trauma for completely different reasons though. Glaring mistakes were committed in the printing of the instructions for the test. The headers on the answer sheets for the Physics and the Mathematics papers were interchanged, leaving students flummoxed. The Hindi version of the paper was rigged with even more blatant printing errors. Besides, a most inexplicable error was committed in the marking scheme of a particular set of questions. One which allowed a student with zero knowledge a chance to score 93 marks in the examination. Students cried hoarse for a re-examination but it fell on deaf ears.

These incidents have cast a cloud of doubt over the credibility of the IITJEE and the CAT. What has been most disappointing is the response from the convenors of the two examinations. In either of the cases, the institutes have resorted to blame games and have done precious little to acknowledge, leave alone redress, the mistakes committed by them. For institutes like the IITs and IIMs who pride themselves on their exclusivity, CAT 2009 and IITJEE 2010 will remain a blot on their reputation. There is an urgent need for these issues in entrance examinations to be addressed and such incidents prevented on future occasions. For the sake of the country's top institutions, we hope they are soon.