CAT 2009 - What Went Wrong

There were many problems regarding the server crash downs. On the very first day i.e. 28 Nov news of technical problems was being faced by the aspirants. CAT one of the most sort out and prestigious exam in India, this was not expected. Now apart from the technical glitches there were some other problems too, I want to talk about the user interface of the exam that was on-screen.

Let me describe the user interface for you. Above there is this title telling what question you are attempting next describing the section and telling how are you supposed to answer the following question. Then there is the question which you are about to attempt, so far so good. But the problem was the command buttons at the bottom. At the left side corner there was the "previous" button which helps us navigate to the previous question in the sequence, also the "next" button which helps us to navigate to the next question in the sequence. No problems with the next and the previous buttons. Then there is the "marked" button next to previous button which marks the question, enabling us to see the question again as desired, then comes the "review" button in that row which shows a list of all questions and their status such as whether marked or unmarked, complete or incomplete.

The main problem is here, candidates are supposed to double-click on the question in the list to go back to the questions and not press the "end" button. This is because of lack of knowledge of the online test, but hey! Come on you people are giving the CAT exam this much knowledge is expected of you. But candidates are not completely at fault, the designer of the user interface are also at fault they should have the text on the button as end review and not just simply end candidates got confused and ended up terminating their exam, now once ended there is no hope, this was not expected with student's career at stake. Candidates making such mistakes were so disappointed as there wasn't any provision to resume their exam again. Many candidates made this mistake and were not given an extra chance, it's a pity.

Coming back to the user interface next to review button was the "quit" button now what the hell was the quit button was doing there it should be somewhere away from the group of buttons discussed earlier or should be at least red in color as a sign of warning that you are about to terminate your exam for which you have been waiting for so long. Such mistake are not acceptable doesn't matter if the exam is online for the first time students had their career on-line and this what they get.