CAT Debacle…a complete WTF situation

28th Nov 09…CAT exam’s first day…this time the management gurus have decided to go online…no more paperwork and stuff and to save some cost…actually a good decision…but only till the noon of 28th Nov.

I was amongst the few lazy asses who bought the CAT form almost on the last day and hence we were the ones who got the slot of the 1st day…maximum people would be choosing 5th and 6th Dec weekend.

So I went to my centre in Bandra and my friend Ankit was with me…we had 3.30 pm time slot. We were called 2 hours before and we did reach then…we firstly wondered that why the hell guys who appeared for the slot of 10 am are are coming out at 2 and 2.30 but then thought may be just that their exam started bit late.

And then we got our seats in respective computer labs, at first the exam application wasn’t starting. For first 15 mins we thought it is a regular trouble the people there would be of help but then the problem was there for all the students and then the situation went chaotic as almost no one was able to give the exam and then we were told that there is server crash or some overload shit that screwed the exam…

We all were like wtf man…means cant u guys even take care of one exam…and do u really have any idea how big is that??? For me and Ankit, we went just cuz we bought the forms…we didn’t study…but there are people who slog their asses studying like 20 hours a day only for this D Day of theirs’ and when they come here thinking the battle of 2 and half hours will change their life when they win it…what they see is this bullshit mismanagement…they are told the exams not today and when it is, this will be informed on mail or msgs or calls…how do u expect some one to react???
This is a big psychological defeat for people who study so seriously…

No kidding…for one girl I came across…the software hanged in the middle of the exam…after she had completed 20 questions…fuckin 20 questions…isn’t this a security breach…what if she post those 20 question online…what will be done then??

People don’t choose dates randomly…they choose dates cuz of some reason…people come from various city for this exam…I know people who even came from US just to give their CAT (the same girl mentioned above) and she is supposed to travel back to US tomorrow…how is rescheduling the exam going to help her??? Will there be US return tickets sponsored to her??

There were 2 people in our room who were giving the paper while all this chaos was going on…I really feel sorry for them as there was no room for them to concentrate but then the others too couldn’t control themselves…it was good that after sometime we all vacated the room and shifted to other classroom where we were told about rescheduling.

The prometric people have performed pathetically bad …can’t they even test one software performance and one server speed…can’t u write scripts to bring thousands of people online on one server and test its performance…I know I am getting too technical…but this is for one smart ass who was present in the argument and raised a point…dude how do u expect them to test server for 20000 people…man we IT people do it all the time…do u even fuckin know how does a sever work…fuckhead.

It was one hell of a experience, I never ever imagined that one of the biggest exam in India would get cancelled cuz of such a mismanagement…and the other surprise was today morning when the server problem was still persistent and the exam got cancelled again on the 2nd day…the feeling is funny now…I am simply laughing…I don’t have anything better to do…

Anyways I just hope that the problem gets solved very soon cuz I know this exam matters a lot for lot many people who actually wait for this one BIG DAY of CAT exam and it doesn’t fuckin matter to them to darken the circles on OMR or to click the radiobuttons on computer screen.

Best luck buddies :-)

** only good thing that happened on that evening was that I saw SRK on his terrace when he came out to greet his fans since it was bakri eid :D