A total of 2,31,067 candidates are expected to appear in India’s biggest MBA entrance test, the Common Admission Test conducted by the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (IIM-L) on November 26.
“By and large all preparations have been made for the test. We wish all the candidates best of luck for the test,” said Prof Neeraj Dwivedi of IIM(L), the convener of the examination.
“The test, which will be held in two sessions of 180 minutes each, will have three sections. Section I will have verbal ability and reading comprehension; section II will be data interpretation and logical reasoning and section III will deal with quantitative ability,” Prof Dwivedi said.
Some questions in each section may not be of multiple choice type and candidates will have to type direct answers online.
“We will also allow the use of the basic onscreen calculator for computation. Candidates will be allotted exactly 60 minutes for answering questions in each section and they cannot switch from one section to another while answering questions in a section,” the convener said.
CAT 2017 will be conducted in centres spread across approximately 140 cities.
This year the number of women candidates registered for CAT-2017 has increased this year by 1.16% over last year’s figure. Against total applicants of 231,067, this year 78,009 women candidates will take the examination. Last year 76,000 women had appeared in the exam. The number of male candidates this year is 153,027.
This year the number of transgender candidates also increased to 31 from 22 last year, said Prof Dwivedi. The number of physically challenged applicants is 910 against last year’s 921.
Registration for the Common Admission Test (CAT), gateway to IIMs and other leading B-schools, declined a bit this year. It had shot up to a seven-year high in 2016, with 232,434 candidates applying for the entrance test.
Information related to CAT 2017 results will be tentatively available starting second week of January 2018 on this website. The list of candidates shortlisted for the next level of selection will be made available on the website of the respective IIMs.
Each IIM will send interview letters to the shortlisted candidates directly. The criteria for shortlisting vary among IIMs. Candidates will have to visit the admission hotlinks of the respective websites of IIMs for further information.
This year IIM-L had extended the last date of registration for the entrance test from September 20 to 25 “to accommodate more candidates”. During the five days extension period some 20,000 candidates had applied, Prof Dwivedi said.
The candidates will be permitted to download their admit card till the test date. Dwivedi said a tutorial to understand the format of the test was made available on the CAT website from October 18.
CAT scores are accepted by the 20 IIMs and more than 100 business schools across the country. Around 4000 seats are offered through IIMs.