IIM results: Cut off comes down by 1%

BANGALORE: Jammed websites, fogged-out results, endless wait and plenty of chaos — that was the story on Tuesday for nearly 1.8 lakh students waiting for the first round of the Common Admission Test (CAT) results. At the time of going to press, IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Kolkata had announced their shortlisted 820 and 988 candidates, respectively. The IIM-Kozhikode website had virtually crashed as rumours spread that it had also released the list.

For IIM-Lucknow, it was another story altogether. The heavy fog in Delhi played truant with its results. “We were expecting to get our results from Bangalore. They seem to have got delayed,” said Sukumar Nandi, part of the admission team at IIM Lucknow.

This year’s CAT format was different — it was two-and-a-half hours long instead of the normal two hours and had 75 questions instead of last year’s 90. Students were expecting the cut-off for shortlisted candidates to go up this year. “Going by the IIM-A results (at around 98.3 percentile) it has actually come down by almost 1%,” said an IndiaTimes spokesperson.

Unlike in the past, IIM-A has clearly spelt out the sectional and overall cut-off for shortlisting candidates this year. Said Delhi-based Kapil Khurana, who appeared for the test for the fourth time, “I know clearly where I lost.” Khurana, with 99.96 percentile, failed to make it to the IIM-A list as his score in English was lower than the sectional cut-off mark.

Cyber cafes and MBA training institutes saw students pouring in to check their results. Speculation about results abounded on blogs and discussion forums like pagalguy.com.

“I found out that results were out from pagalguy.com,” said Vineet, an aspirant. The discussion forums were speculating about percentiles and cut-offs among other issues. By the end of the evening, even these websites could not be accessed. “With sites being extremely slow and difficult to access, till 6 pm I was able to check results of only two of my students,” said KS Bhaskar, director, Chennai-based training institute Ascent Education.

The chaos was because of two reasons. This time, scorecards were announced much before the shortlisted candidates, leading to speculations about the cut-offs. Last year, the list of shortlisted candidates was declared along with individual scorecards of all aspirants. Also, there was a huge time gap between shortlists put out by the various IIMs, leading to anxiety among students.

“Last year, IIM-Kolkata announced its results by midnight. By early morning, nearly all results were declared,” said Ravi Handa, a Bangalore-based MBA aspirant. Students were expecting the same trend this time too. However that didn’t happen. “We had to wait till late afternoon to see our results and within half-an-hour of the scorecards being declared, the IIM-Kozhikode site got jammed,” said Ravi. It was impossible to access the results on IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Bangalore websites as well.

Those who did manage to see their scores, are now waiting to find out if they have made it to the top 3,000 students, who will move into the next round, which consists of personal interviews and group discussions from February to April. The CAT may well be out of the bag, but to find out who has belled it may still take some more days to find out!

(with inputs from Sreeradha D Basu in Kolkata, Mansi Bhatt in Ahmedabad & Malini Goyal in Delhi)