More women, professionals seek to bell the CAT this year
The number of women applying for the Common Admission Test (CAT) has gone up by 8.6% as compared to last year, taking the number of woman applicants to almost 61,000.
The number of women applying for the Common Admission Test (CAT) has gone up by 8.6% as compared to last year, taking the number of woman applicants to almost 61,000.
The IIMs had, earlier this year, said that they would want their campuses to be more inclusive and would encourage more women to apply. Some IIMs such as IIM Rohtak and IIM Raipur said they would award more marks to women applicants.
Many IIMs had also said he would want more people from backgrounds other than engineering to apply. This, however, did not have much of an impact as the number of applicants with an engineering background increased by more than 12,000 — an increase of 8% as compared to last year.
The number of applicants from humanities and commerce, meanwhile, came down by 700.
“Efforts are on to have a relook at the Common Admission Test (CAT). We will try to introduce some changes that will be helpful for people from disciplines other than engineering,” said SSS Kumar, CAT 2012 convener and professor at IIM Kozhikode.
In a trend that Kumar termed “positive”, more people with work experience applied for CAT this year. There is an increase of 43 per cent in the test takers with 2-3 years of work experience.
Registrations under the OBC category went up from 3.3% of the total registrations last year to 13.3% this year. Registrations under the SC/ST categories have also gone up by 7.8%.
“The shift in candidate pool in terms of gender and social balance is a positive indication that our society is becoming more aware of the opportunities that are available,” he said.