IIMs to make CAT global

The Indian Institutes of Management are quietly working towards expanding their Common Admission Test into an international examination to attract students from abroad and compete with the globally-popular Graduate Management Aptitude Test. Charu Sudan Kasturi reports.

The Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) are quietly working towards expanding their Common Admission Test into an international examination to attract students from abroad and compete with the globally-popular Graduate Management Aptitude Test.

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The initiative is a key component of a confidential contract signed between IIMs and Prometric, the American computer-based testing (CBT) service provider.

"Prometric will provide CBT services to IIMs in India ... and to IIMs for global expansion of the CAT program," states an agreement signed between the IIMs and the service provider, accessed by HT through the Right to Information Act.

The "global expansion" was also a reason why IIM rejected the bid of the Graduate Management Aptitude Council — a non profit body that conducts GMAT — for the computerisation of the CAT.

But IIMs have never revealed a vision to pit CAT against GMAT, used by top B-schools in North America and western Europe.

"We wanted to keep the project under wraps. No one wants to forewarn competitors," an IIM Director said.