New Delhi: Results for the Common Admission Test (CAT), gateway to the coveted Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), were released Saturday. The top 10 candidates, who have scored hundred percentile, are all men from engineering backgrounds, according to IIM Kozhikode, the organising institute this year.
Six of the students are from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) while two are from the National Institutes of Technology (NIT), CAT 2019 convener Subhasis Dey told the media.
“Twenty-one candidates have scored an overall 99.99 percentile in CAT 2019. Out of these candidates, 19 candidates are from the engineering/technology background,” Dey said.
Of the candidates scoring an overall 100 percentile, four are from Maharashtra, while the rest are from Jharkhand, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.
CAT 2019 also saw the largest number of candidates in the last ten years — 2,09,926 — of which 75,004 were women, 1,34,917 men, and five transgender persons.
Women accounted for nearly 36 per cent of the candidates this year, but none made it to the list of 100 percentilers. Two years ago, in CAT 2017, two women and three non-engineers had made it to the top 20. No women had made it to the top 20 in the 2018 exam.
What happens next
Once the CAT scores are out, IIMs will release their shortlists for the admission process. More than 115 other non-IIM institutions will also use CAT scores for admission into their management programmes.
There are 20 IIMs in the country right now, including the first-generation ones in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Lucknow, Kozhikode and Indore, and second-generation ones in Shillong, Rohtak, Ranchi, Raipur, Tiruchirappalli, Kashipur and Udaipur.
The latest addition to the list are the third generation IIMs, which opened between 2015 to 2016 in Nagpur, Amritsar, Bodhgaya, Sirmaur, Visakhapatnam and Jammu.
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Those of us who completed their graduation in Commerce, Arts or Science from universities where getting a first class is a bridge too far leave alone securing 80-90 percent find it extremely difficult to get a seat in an IIM despite great CAT scores, simply because IIMs consider past marks. This need to be done away with.
It would be interesting to learn the academic backgrounds of those who set the test. If bulk of them have engineering backgrounds then the rest may be biased. There are non-arithmatical ways of testing analytical skills which may even out the playing field. Bear in mind too that numbers are a representation of reality and not reality. In management the ability to deal with reality determines the outcome in numbers.
Irony is that, none of the Commerce graduates could make up in top 10 , to study business management course. IIM’s exam pattern seems suits engineering background students very much.
No this is not so, saying exam pattern suits engineering students will be wrong,
Instead the reason lies behind the ability and potential of such students to study for maximum hours…
This photograph is of the Louis Kahn Plaza at IIM A, named in honour of its Architect. The convocation ceremony is held here, a proud moment for the gifted young women and men who have studied here for two years, and their parents.