Over 2 lakh aspirants to write CAT today

LUCKNOW: A total of 2,31,067 candidates will appear for the India’s biggest MBA entrance exam, the Common Admission Test, to be conducted by the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (IIM-L) on November 26.

“By and large all preparations have been made. We wish all the candidates best of luck,” 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 data interpretation and logical reasoning and section III will deal with quantitative ability,” 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,” Dwivedi said.

The test will be conducted in centres spread across 140 cities.

This year the number of women candidates registered for CAT-2017 has increased by 1.16% over last year’s tally. Against a total of 2,31,067 this year 78,009 women candidates will write the exam. Last year 76,000 women candidates had written the exam. The number of male candidate this year is 1,53,027.

This year number of transgender candidates also increased to 31 from 22 last year, said Prof Dwivedi. Number of physically challenged applicants was 910 against last year’s 921.

Registration for the 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 results will be tentatively available starting second week of January 2018 on CAT website. The list of candidates shortlisted for the next level will be made available on the website of the respective IIMs.

Each IIM will send interview letters to the shortlisted candidates directly. The criterion for short listing varies from IIM to IIM.