Preparatory schools go the IIM way

Leading institutes line up large investments to give online training.
With the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) mulling to take the Common Admission Test (CAT) online in a couple of years, MBA test-preparing institutes like Career Launcher and TIME are also preparing to get their online act together.

Career Launcher, for instance, plans to invest around Rs 3 million across its centres to provide computer terminals for its students. “CAT online means taking a test on the computer which serves questions from a local server. We are working towards equipping ourselves with training and putting our methodology in place,” says Shiva Kumar, Director, Career Launcher, an MBA-test preparing institute.

TIME, on the other hand, says it could tie-up with a network of colleges or companies like Reliance Infocom to facilitate online training for its students. “We are looking at tying up with computer training institutes or a network of colleges with computer labs at various centres to conduct computer-based training sessions,” said Jaideep Singh Chaudhary, product manager — CAT, TIME. TIME has around 169 offices across 81 cities and it trains over 50,000 students for CAT exam alone.

Online testing could allow a host of flexibilities like convenience of testing across various centers, conducting test at any time of the year in a phased-out manner over a span of 30-odd days and validity of scores beyond a year — to the IIMs admission committee and the students.

According to sources, IIMs have already invited tenders for conducting the test by parties or companies with ability to put up infrastructure that can handle the exam on such a large scale. The CAT exams could be formatted on the lines of the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) so that the scores are valid for a year or two.

Meanwhile, the IIMs are considering online CAT to counter the burgeoning number of CAT applicants each year. The numbers have moved from 90,000 aspirants to 2.3 lakh aspirants (in 2007) over a span of four years. This year the number of students to appear for CAT are expected to go up to 300,000 students. In comparison, a decade ago, the number of CAT applicants was somewhere around 35,000.

Industry players are also expecting that an online exam could reduce the number of questions. “The number of questions in CAT has been reducing constantly. In the past two years, there have been 75 questions in total. It is 45 per cent of the total number questions that came in CAT 1998. Interestingly, there are around 75 questions in GMAT which is on-line too,” adds Kumar.

Online CAT would mean that comfort with working on and reading from the computer is a must for students. Part of the practice for students will shift to the computers. “Though the fundamentals would remain the same, people could be more willing to learn through computers,” adds Kumar.

While there are concerns about security breaches to the test process, industry players say CAT online can look at BITSAT—graduate admission exams being successfully applied by BITS, Pilani.

“The BITSAT model has an outsourced partner who has built the testing engine, which generates tests based on a tagged database supplied by the authorities. For BITSAT, BITS Pilani conducts tests at designated centers over a span of 40 days. Students book the time slot when they would want to take the test.

While students who take the tests in a particular time slot would similar papers, candidates in different time slots get different papers,” says a professor from a management institute which takes CAT scores for admission. The number of students who took BITSAT last year was 90,000 and is expected to touch 1.3 lakh this year.

The good news for students, however, could be that though these institutes are looking at upgrading their infrastructure to meet the needs of online CAT, they do not plan to pass on the cost to the students, at present. The fee that these institutes charge from students varies between Rs 20,000 and Rs 25,000 per year for tier I towns and Rs 18,000 for tier II towns.