IIMB to provide facilities to disabled students for CAT 2016

Persons with disabilities who will write the Common Admission Test (CAT), 2016 in December for admissions to the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), can look forward to a comfortable test.

IIM Bangalore (IIMB), which will conduct the test this time, announced a slew of measures aimed at helping specially abled candidates. Centres where such candidates appear will have a coordinator to assist them. The contact details of the coordinator will be provided to the candidates prior to the test. The centres will also have a wheelchair. The CAT application webpage will have a separate tab to capture the assistance required by the disabled candidates. These include the option of using a scribe, request for a wheelchair, request to enable the zoom feature, among others. Students can opt for these facilities between October 1 and 5. There will be a dedicated help desk - catpwdsupport@iimb.ernet.in - to assist and answer queries of candidates.

For visual questions like graphs, pictures or maps, alternative questions of equal difficulty will be provided to candidates with visual disability. On the test day, disabled candidates will be given priority access of 15 minutes before permitting other candidates to the test venue for registration.

Candidates who have already registered for the test, have been given an option to correct mistakes, if any, in the application. Details like percentage of marks, work experience, and programmes selected can be changed. No other details can be edited. This option will be available on the CAT application form webpage from October 1 to 5.

Prof Rajendra K. Bandi, convenor, CAT 2016, advised candidates to register early and avoid inconvenience at the eleventh hour as there is bound to be a surge in registrations at the last minute. This could lead to a load on the servers that could impact the server response time.