B-schools oppose new AICTE test

After creating confusion over admissions in Business schools, the Indian technical education regulator, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), in a major goof-up had to withdraw a wrong sample paper on Thursday for its first Central Management Admission Test (CMAT) to be held in February 2012.

Updated on: Dec 16, 2011, 01:35:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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After creating confusion over admissions in Business schools, the Indian technical education regulator, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), in a major goof-up had to withdraw a wrong sample paper on Thursday for its first Central Management Admission Test (CMAT) to be held in February 2012.

The AICTE last week had announced CMAT to replace state level entrance examination for management schools to reduce stress on students, thereby increasing the number of all India entrance examinations for management schools to five. Combined Admission Test (CAT), Management Aptitude Test (MAT) and Xavier Admission Test are among popular admission tests for B-schools.

Many 1,500 B-schools have already opted for the more credible admission tests saying the AICTE announcement came very late and the test was similar to CAT. The online computer based test will be held from 20-28 February in 61 cities, too late as most B-schools close their admission by March end.

But, the AICTE has made it clear that only CMAT score will be used for allotment of seats in the institutes approved by the council. "It will create confusion for students and admission problems private institutes," protested H Chaturvedi, alternate president of Educational Promotional Society of India, an apex body of private education providers. "We want CMAT to be optional, not mandatory".

The All India Management Association (AIMA), which conducts MAT, said conducting a common test of this nature across the country in an only online format will only widen the digital divide. Over 90% of MAT students opt for paper based test, AIMA said in an email reply to HT.

AICTE, which has partnered with private organisation to conduct CMAT, had to face embarrassing situation as it placed a sample paper for the test on its website.

The paper placed on the council's CMAT website on December 14 was related to corporate finance not related to four set of questions for the AICTE's first national test. The 100 questions for CMAT are on Quantitative Techniques and Data Interpretation, Local Reasoning, Language Comprehension and General Awareness.

Receiving rebuke from the management institutes, the council on Thursday removed the trial paper and asked the students to wait till December 18 to try the CMAT format.

AICTE chairperson S S Mantha did not reply to text messages or calls. Rajender Kumar, director in-charge of CMAT, was also not available for comments.

Jamshedpur based XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai based Institute of Management and Technology have already decided that they will not admit students on basis of CMAT score. "We have already started our admission process. We will not be altering the admission process or timelines to accommodate AICTE CMAT," said an official of XLRI.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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