On day two, the problems continued. The Common Admission Test (CAT) for management, one of the most prestigious exams in the country, saw cancellations at 49 labs in 24 centres across 13 cities, just one less than Saturday.

The US-based Prometric, which is conducting the exams in partnership with NIIT, said on its website that students who were allocated seats in closed labs “were rescheduled to other centers”. The only lab which opened Sunday from those closed down on Saturday was in Chennai.

Students have to go to various labs to take the exam, which are loaded on each computer by the centre. It’s not an online exam. A lab is a sub-section of an examination centre, usually an engineering college, B-school or NIIT centre. The test has to be downloaded from Prometric’s central server on to a lab’s local server. This is the first time the exams were made computer-based.

The exams had been hit by glitches on Saturday, with Prometric saying approximately 2,000 exams could not be delivered because of “technical issues at selected computers.” It did not give figures about Sunday. Prometric said it had generated new appointments for these individuals who had missed the exam and they were being contacted through SMS and email messages. “Prometric technicians have been dispatched to address these isolated problems,” the site said.

At SRM University in Chennai, students were seen receiving calls from Prometric for rescheduling their test timing. But, the same messages had created confusion in Bangalore. The candidates were told to wait by the test authorities, even as they received messages from Prometric asking them to go to a different centre to take the exam.

In all, 254,000 students are taking CAT 2009 with a hope to get through the top management institutes in India, including the Indian Institutes of Management. The number of days has been extended by one, because of disruptions. Prometric has identified 360 labs across 32 cities in the country for the exams.

Students in centres across the country, particularly Chennai and Bangalore and a number of Tier II cities, had reported that they could not to log in using the given username. They also reported that computers were ‘crashing’ or ‘shutting down’ during the course of exam and execution errors were being thrown up on screen in the middle of the test, some questions refusing to get clicked and hence answered and so on.

Experts said this could be because of the security layers built into the local server to screen out anything other than the formatted questions. They could misinterpreted even legitimate questions and blocked them. “The authorities may not have adopted a foolproof mechanism, technologically speaking. It’s possible that the servers used were incapable of handling so many data packets,” said Partha Das Chowdhury, who had done his post doctoral research on security surveillance at Cambridge University and is now CEO of eMotions Infomedia.

It appeared that security in this case was built into application layer, leaving the network layer open to attacks, he said, adding, “In the UK, the experiment with online voting failed precisely because of this.”

Tushar Basu, a IIM-C alumnus and managing director of Analytic Consultants, said, “The whole problem may have been caused by intrusion. Or they may have failed to anticipate the number of students taking the exam, which may have built a degree of pressure on the server.”

Some mishaps have been non-technical, in getting the students organised, verified biometrically and registered on their assigned computers, even though they were instructed to reach the labs two hours before the scheduled time of the exam.

“It seems incredible that such a goof up could have happened, not only in the technology but also in conducting the test itself,” said Career Launcher director Shiv Kumar.

Jaideep Choudhry of TIME agreed, “While it is not clear whether Prometric was directly involved in setting the question papers, the invigilators at the centres were normally faculty from the centres (colleges), with occasional assistance from NIIT,” adding that the faculty may not have been “completely trained to handle the complexities and intricacies of the procedure”.

Students appearing for the test said the procedure was actually not more complicated than previous years. Said Gaurav Luniya, a student spokesperson for IIM-Kozhikode, “Even in previous years, we used optical mark recognition in answering, which means that the answers were evaluated electronically, without human subjectivity.”

The objectivity of a computer-based test had, hence, been achieved. “If this computer-based test is in fact a step towards changes in CAT format, I wonder why it wasn’t introduced as a pilot or students not given the option of a paper-based test.” Management Aptitude Test (MAT) also went computer-based this year, but with a paper-based option.

There were changes in the format of CAT this year to accommodate the process of testing over two and a half lakh students. Kumar of Career Launcher said, “There is no doubt that computer-based test is the way to go. Though CAT is an competitive exam, GRE and GMAT are far superior in terms of testing the real capabilities of a candidate. I would hope that Prometric is planning to upgrade CAT to those levels by making it adaptive.”

Choudhry said IIMs also need to make sure that issues of data privacy are taken into consideration. “We have received information from candidates about receiving marketing emails and messages based on the information they had given while registering. Now, their fingerprints are also being taken.”

Kumar said students were bound to feel victimised and react so. “But, it is time for CAT to mature into not so much a test of intense training but of accumulated intelligence.” It seems to have already lost its mystic superior quality by faltering this year.