I have not included any details of the CAT paper in this blog which will give you an idea of how the question paper actually was due to the non-disclosure agreement. But I felt that I should speak out on how the test is getting mis-managed at certain places. My advice to you people is that to go there with an attitude that "whatever happens I don't care. Anyway I will get complete 2.25 hours to complete the paper in a good environment, so whatever happens before that or after that, I don't care."
I reached CMR institute at 7 am as the scheduled appointment required me to report by 8 am. By 7:30 am, we were promptly allowed into the venue. The security and infrastructure arrangements were elaborate. My ID and Admit card were checked at every entrance. "Good start, Prometric is making them worthy of the $40 million they took from IIMs" I thought. At 8, we were allowed to enter our block and asked to wait inside a waiting room. Then started the series of mismanagement. Every now and then, a guy would come and make an announcement in broken English. I didn't quite catch the announcement initially, but then realized that he was calling people for photo and finger print scanning. Anyway I sat and watched the drama where a bunch of people will run towards the entrance whenever an announcement was made and only 5 out of them were allowed in for the photo shoot. There was a poor guy who tried 6 times (yes, I was counting) and was returned back every time. Anyway when my turn came at 9, I realized that there was only a single personal for an entire group of students. (No wonder, you are asked to come at 8).Basically, the whole process of security check and photo-shoot takes only 10 minutes, the 2 hours bracket is only because Prometric don't have enough employees and volunteers to complete the process smoothly.
By 9:15 am, we were done with all the proceedings and all set to take our tests. By 9:45 am, all the students other than people belonging to my room were allowed to check in into their respective rooms and an announcement came that the test in our room will be delayed by 10 - 15 minutes. "Tests are getting canceled right-left-center and he is talking about a 10 minutes delay, no problems" I thought. But I was too optimistic. 10:15 came and went, so did 10:30 and 11:00 am, still no news about our CAT exam.As the prometric people were tightly hunched up inside the testing room, romour mills started churning out various scenarios - Servers are down; we won't be able to take test today. I was lucky to have bumped against 2 of my friends from NITC, didn't get bored at all during that long wait. But I could see people exhibiting a wide array of emotions. Most of them were extremely tense; that is understandable - such a big day in their life is getting marred with unpredictability. Finally the information came from the officials at 11:55 am. The servers are indeed down; none of the people in our block are taking test. All the ones allowed in are just sitting in front of the computer :). We were lucky we could at least sit and chat in the waiting room. The announcement continued "If the servers doesn't come up by 12:30 pm, the tests will be rescheduled". By 12:25 pm, I have almost made plans for the afternoon when the announcement came "The servers are up, take your seats". Within 3 minutes, I was frisked and seated in front of the computer screen. After that, things were smooth (except for the couple of usual windows read only register errors and date mismatch issues) and we completed the exam by 2:45 pm. Please make it a point to take the tutorial on using the computer apparatus; I was unable to do it because an invigilator while trying to fix an issue with the software directly clicked the "start test" icon.
Basically after this, I feel that Prometric has not effectively handled the gigantic volume of nearly 25,000 people a day, may be they were never ready for it. Their other exams such as GRE generally have around 50 - 100 students in a center per session. The metamorphosis of CAT into an online format was an indispensable affair considering the humongous volumes involved and to a very large extent it has been done well. The test interface is pretty good and the guts the IIMs have shown in doing this is commendable. I will aver that everything else are good, except for the way Prometric has managed the full affair - untested processes and under rated servers are marring the success of this fascinating exercise and as far as the IIMs and Prometric are concerned, the issues may be a few technical problems at a minority of their centers, but for every student who went through that time of unpredictability before his crucial test, each and every second seemed like hours of trauma.
