The nternet having given them a harrowing time, a majority of Common Admission Test (CAT) aspirants from eastern India are not smiling - thanks to questions getting little trickier with the passage of time.
The Indian Institute of Management,Calcutta, has stated that the overall cut-off for CAT 2007 had been fixed at 98.96 percentile and above for general category students, while 85.12 and 81.85 percentile have been spelt for SC and ST categories. As for physically challenged candidates, the cut-off is 78.83.
As many as 998 candidates have been shortlisted for Group Discussions(GD) and Personal Interviews (PIs) under the said categories, an IIM-C spokesman told Deccan Herald here on Wednesday. These candidates will be vying for 300 seats - 240 in PGDM and 60 in PGDCM. Interviews will be held in Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, sometime in March. There are indications that GDs and PIs are likely to begin from February in the IIMs, and continue till April.
English tougher
Even though professors at the IIM-Calcutta would not agree, many candidates who appeared for the CAT 2007 found the English question paper quite ambiguous, making it difficult to draw inferences.
"I found the choices in the English question quite ambiguous and I found out later that I was wrong in drawing inferences," said Samik Biswas, a CAT aspirant. But the general complaint about English questions has not been accepted by IIM-C admission chairman Ashish Bhattacharya. While conceding that there were inference questions, he claimed that they would pose no problem to good students as these kinds of questions were set in the previous year too.
GD & PI
Of the 998 students called for GD & PI, a large majority belong to engineering streams, sources said. A software engineer from Wipro having scored 98.57 per cent, received interview calls from Bangalore, Kozhikode and Lucknow besides Calcutta. For engineering students, data interpretation and maths solution become easier since they have to be quite adept at both, says an IIM-C professor.
Sources said that IIM-C failed to call as many SC& ST students as originally planned, because the students in these categories did not get adequate marks to qualify for the GD and PI.