MUMBAI/AHMEDABAD: The Common Admission Test (CAT) may be intended to test some of India’s brightest students, but the paper itself was not error-free on Sunday. Three questions of four marks each were incorrect in the mathematics and English sections of the paper.
Disappointed, a number of students have decided to file an application under the Right to Information Act demanding an answer key from the Indian Institutes of Management for the incorrect questions.
“The errors cannot be ignored as these questions carried substantial marks,” said Shilpi Gupta, an aspirant. “We wasted 5-10 minutes trying to solve them. The IIMs must respond to our queries.”
Amit Halgikar, who also took the exam, said, “There were more errors compared to previous years.”
The errors were pointed out by students and by coaching institutes that help students prepare for the exam. They claimed that two questions in the maths section were misleading — one offered incorrect multiple choice answers and the other contained contradictory data in two sets.
In the English section, a question offered only two answer choices, both incorrect.
Gautam Purie, managing director of Career Launcher and a former student of IIM Bangalore, said: “I appeared for the CAT exam myself to study the changes in the pattern. Every year there are errors, but they are often not reported.”
Purie said students who attempted the question that gave contradictory data in two different sets should be given full marks “since the remaining sets contained the correct question. It will be an injustice if all are not treated equally”.
This year, the paper had a new format. Most found the new format easy with the number of questions reduced from 90 to 75 and the time limit increased by 30 minutes.
Though students claimed there were errors, Ashish Bhattacharyya, chairman of admissions at IIM Calcutta, which coordinated the exam this time, said there was only one error in the verbal section. “It was a minor mistake and our expert group will take care of that,” he said.
Bhattacharyya said that 1,95,000 students appeared for the exam across India.
