CAT— Not the Only Sufficient Tool for Assessing Competence

For a professional educational institute that is acclaimed as one of the premier business schools in the country and abroad, it’s a constant challenge to always live up to the industry’s demands, experts’ judgments, and students’ aspirations. As one of the measures that ensure a consistent delivery of quality, input talent must be duly assessed and screened for their qualification. This is why the top-most business schools, such as Institute of Management Technology (IMT), rely on the results of the reputed CAT examination. Although the CAT examination is known to be a sufficiently challenging test of skills that does an excellent job in assessment of candidates for admission into IMT, like most of the other exams it apparently has its own limitations.

According to Dr. Bibek Banerjee, the director at IMT Ghaziabad, there has been a continual change in the output of the CAT examination. This change subtly indicates the imperfection of CAT as the only reliable way of assessing the aspirants and filtering out the most competent ones. For instance, as in case of any other examination, CAT’s results are also in figures which do not suffice to tell the intellectual capabilities of an individual. This gets even more difficult when the number of assessed candidates exceeds a whopping figure of two lakhs each year. As a result, several candidates who deserve an admission into a good business school do not get admission while few others who were relatively less competent get through the examination.

This is why the virtual interviews technology was introduced at IMT Ghaziabad in form of the VMock system. This system was centered on allowing students to choose the questions they could answer the best and helping faculty to access them in a better way. Although, being a new system, it suffered from certain technical snags as Dr. Bibek Banerjee said, “In the end, because of the snags we also had to personally interview them, making the VI a pre-screening process. We are observing strong correlation between performance the VI and the personal interviews, strengthening our belief that we should spend the intervening year fixing the mistakes in the system so that at this time next year, we can run it in a smoother fashion.”

Undoubtedly, having the highly competent students, means that their caliber can be modulated by quality education to help them achieve the success they want in their career. That is why selection of quality input that is fit for a rigorous process of training and development is crucial for maintaining the glory and reputation of a top-class business school too.