JOIN US At least two prominent management institutes in the State have admitted to receiving a few applications from some of the 80 candidates whose Common Admission Test (CAT) scores were tampered with.
“We did receive as many as 14 applications from among the 80 students. However, we are fortunate to not have admitted any of them,” said Professor Chaudhary Prasad, chairperson (Admissions), T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal.
Alliance School of Business, Bangalore, immediately carried out an inspection as soon as news of the inflated scores reached them and found that a few students had applied for seats, but they admitted none.
Two other institutes even went to the extent of admitting a few of these students, only to withdraw them once the discrepancy was revealed. Both colleges have already cancelled the admissions of the students concerned.
Ongoing investigations
Even as the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry initiated a probe into alleged discrepancies in the results of last year’s CAT examination published online, police in Kozhikode, Kerala, claimed they were closing in on the culprits, based on the findings by the Cyber Crime Cell.
Kozhikode City Police Commissioner G Sparjan Kumar told Deccan Herald on Friday that the investigation was also being directed to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, where the web hosting company Web Weavers is based.
The master database of the CAT results – managed by Prometric, the company that conducted and evaluated the test – have been intact. However, the results published online on www.catiim.in by Web Weavers had showed discrepancies in the results of 80 examinees, the IIMs had stated in a notification.
A press release by IIM-K on Thursday said: “Web Weavers’ association with IIMs started from CAT 2010 onwards. It must be noted that IIM-K is not responsible for any manipulations on the website.”
IIM-K had filed a complaint in this connection with the city police following which an FIR was filed on June 15. A comparison of results on the website and the master database had revealed the altered figures.
Tampered data
According to sources in the Cyber Crime Cell of Kozhikode police, the tampered data has been uploaded from a server in a North Indian town. “Further, an agent of the company (Web Weavers) based in Kozhikode has been absconding since news of these discrepancies started coming out,” the Commissioner said.
“The IIM-K had filed the complaint at the Kunnamangalam station (in Kozhikode) about the tampered examination results being published online. We had seized the institute’s server to investigate into the discrepancies,” an official at the Cyber Crime Cell told Deccan Herald.
IIM-K had held the CAT between October 11 and November 6, 2012. While the 13 IIMs that use the master database for admission short-listing have not been affected, other institutes that base admission on CAT scores have been alerted on the issue.
Websites devoted to management courses in the country have gone into a tizzy ever since the news of tampering broke out. Some websites have even gone ahead and named some of the candidates whose marks were inflated and the institutes they had applied to and the status of those applications in these institutes.