JOIN USHC notice to Centre, IIMs on CAT-2009
The division bench headed by Justice V Gopalagowda, which heard the matter has ordered issue of emergent notice.
In a Public Interest Litigation, Harsha N S, a resident of Marathahalli, had sought directions to cancel the earlier CAT-2009 and re-conduct it in a paper-pencil format.
Terming the CAT 2009 online test a failure, the petitioner said that the first online test which made news in the last week of November and the first week of December witnessed several cases of cheating, mismanagement, leaks, rampant reboots and all round mismanagement.
The petitioner said that there was a disclaimer regarding the conduct of CAT exams, stating that any disclosure, publishing, reproducing, storing, transmitting or facilitating transmission of the content of CAT in part or as a whole or in any form shall be in violation of the Indian Contract Act 1872 or the Copy Right Act 1957 or Information Technology Act- 2000.
Questions repeated
He had pointed out that the questions which have come in earlier slots were repeated in later slots. The questions which appeared in earlier CAT exams were repeated in 2009. “This was made public by some dummy candidates and some coaching institutes on day 1, some coaching institutes even sent messages to students to revise old CAT papers and few conducted special crash courses,” the petitioner said.
The petitioner further said that the students who attended earlier sessions had discussed the questions in Orkut and other blogs. The technical problems like delay in loading question papers to the system and half trained invigilators further delayed the examination for hours.
“Even during the test, candidates reported an interruption in their test due to various technical glitches like slow loading of test, sudden computer shutdown, system hanging and error popping,” the petitioner said.
Siji Malayil, counsel for the petitioner, said that 2.15 lakh students appeared for the test and retest is necessary because at least 8,000 candidates could not take the test at the scheduled dates.
Though the exams are said to be fool proof, it is no more so and despite the adequate proof no action has been initiated against anybody.
The petitioner said that the faculty association at IIM, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkatta have passed resolution demanding to scrap the computer and resort to the traditional method.