Server develops snag, exam delayed by an hour

On the second day of the first online Common Aptitude Test, applicants were again at the receiving end. At one of the three centres in the tricity, the exam was delayed by around an hour.

Over 20 students at the Indo Global College of Engineering, Mohali, were affected due to the delay.

“As we were told, we reported at 8 in the morning for the exam at 10 am. But the server developed some snag and there was complete chaos,” a student said. “Finally, around 11 am we started the test.”

On Saturday, there were complaints of the exam being delayed by two hours.

Students said the centres did not “learn any lessons from yesterday’s chaos in which exam of over 100 students was cancelled due to server crash”.

“If they have been given the responsibility of holding such a prestigious exam, centres should have been better prepared to handle the crisis,” another CAT aspirant said. “It was very stressful, waiting for the system to respond. And then there was this fear of the user ID being considered invalid.”

College authorities refused to comment on the issue.

CAT experts, meanwhile, call it “teething problems”, as the test is being held online for the first time.

“It is being held at a very large scale, with lakhs of students appearing. This region alone has more than ten thousand candidates taking the CAT,” Hridesh Madan, who runs a CAT coaching centre, said.

... contd.