With the autonomy of the Indian Institutes of Management restored now, the institutes may continue to conduct the Common Aptitude Test, the entrance for management schools in the country, according to sources at the All India Council of Technical Education.
After the CAT papers leaked in November 2003, former Minister for Human Resource Development, Murli Manohar Joshi, wanted the examination to be conducted by the ministry of HRD instead of the IIMs.
The one man Shunglu committee was constituted to look into the CAT leak. In fact the IIMs had received a lot of flak for it from the ministry.
On an average a student has to undergo at least half a dozen entrance exams for various management schools in the country. The ministry thus wanted to reduce the number of entrance exams. Sources say that in an year or two gradually there will be a single entrance for all the management schools under AICTE.
After the new ministry coming in, and with the dialogue process between the HRD ministry and the IIMs finally having taken off, sources at the Board of Management Studies, under the AICTE, say that the board simply does not have the manpower to conduct an exam like CAT.
The sheer logistics of conducting an exam for over 100,000 students every year throughout the country is a huge task, said sources.
It is however possible for the HRD ministry to give the responsibility for the conduct of the exam to a third party. Prof. K Subramaniam, advisor, AICTE, cites the example of the Tamil Nadu Joint Entrance being conducted by the Anna University.
In November last AICTE issued a notice to all the management schools by notifying only five exams that will certify students for management schools under AICTE. They are CAT, XAT ( Xaviers Admission Test conducted by XLRI, Jamshedpur), MAT (Management Aptitude test , conducted by AIMA, All India Management Association), ATMA (AIMS Test for Management Admissions conducted by the Association of Indian Management Schools) and JMET ( Joint Management Entrance Test, conducted by the IITs for the management schools established at IIMs). The AICTE is an autonomous body covering more than 900 management schools in the country.
However deemed universities like the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India or Indian Institutes of Planning and Management, say that AICTE rules are not binding on them. It is however, within the powers of AICTE to bring them under a joint entrance if the need be.
The IIMs spend around Rs 13 crore (Rs 130 million) to conduct CAT for nearly 130,000 students who pay Rs 1,000 for the application form for the six institutes at Ahemdabad, Kolkata, Bangalore, Indore, Lucknow and Kozhikode. There have been suggestions to make CAT scores globally acceptable.
The Graduate Management Aptitude Test and the Test of English as Foreign Language, both prerequisites for management schools abroad cost at least 16 times more than CAT.
