Why there won't be an online CAT in 2009!

It is the time of the year when the young minds of this country are fully immersed in their books mugging hard for all the competitive examinations that are about to come in month of Nov. The most important and most prestigious among them is the Combined Aptitude Test or CAT. This is the exam that will help many to take the career escalator. Approximately 2.5 lakh students are about to give this exam and preparing for this exam is a grueling task, for people who have already passed their graduation / post-graduation have to go back and open their wren'n'martins' and 10th standard math books and mug them up. After all that is what CAT asks you. And you have so many coaching classes willing to help you out to get trained on solving these templatized problems using "shortcuts" and "tips and tricks" that they preach. And after so many years of training for CAT many institutes have sprung up. Chief among them are IMS, TIME, Career Launcher, Pegasus and what not. Also there are message boards to collaborate on MBA preparation like pagalguy.com and totalgadha.com. Through their money making schemes they are trying to hit the aspirants top, bottom and center trying to squeeze out every penny from their pockets. In these situations, any utterance by some IIM professor on the changes in CAT pattern is taken as an oracle and publicized by these coaching classes claiming that they are well prepared to help their students out in tackling this new situation. The whole aim is to instill this fear in the mind of the aspirant that dream might remain a dream and not turn into a reality. After all that's what they are here for. Aren't they? So when one of the IIM dons mentioned that they are thinking of taking the CAT online from next year, our coaching classes carefully deleted "thinking" and went ahead creating posters boldly proclaiming 'CAT to go ONLINE starting 2009.' But I would like to let the aspirants know that ye nahi ho sakta. Here's why.
Computers even though accessible to everyone of you who is reading the blog might not be accessible to the Indian 'have-not'. These 'have-not' comprise a large section of population who come from the flood plains of Kosi to the hilly areas of Ladakh, to the average construction worker in the big cities. Many of them might not have the means and money to access the computer but they definitely have the aspiration to make it big in life. And no exam in India can deny them this right if they are capable. And so if a siginficant chunk of the country can not prepare for such kind of an examination owing to the high barriers of prepartion cost it won't be a true competition.

Secondly, an MBA exam that comes closest to CAT in terms of importance is the GMAT. GMAT is a computer based program, also called Computer Adaptive Test. The idea behind these exams is that the level of difficulty of every question changes with how the examinee answered the previous question and hence necessitates the use of computers. Now in case it is planned to implement CAT on computers there will be two ways in which such a exam can be handled, each with its own issues.
In case IIMs plan to implement the examination on same date it will have issues with implementing the exam. From where can you get 2.5 lakh computers for a day with all the required softwares installed? And in case there is a glitch with one of the computers how do you deal with that situation Yes, yes. I can hear you people saying 'Is tereh CAT nahi ho sakta'. And it is actually not possible to implement such kind of an examination.

The other option with IIMs is that they go for exams that are scheduled just like the GMAT where you take your date and go for exams and get a score on that date. However even GMAC had to face certain issues with their method of testing after all the world is not an ideal place. So imagine what will happen in case you have 2.3 lakh people giving exam round the year. No soon a person comes out of the test center he will be trounced by his friends wanting to know 'live questions' and he will have to comply. That way the life cycle of a live question will be very short and it will be very difficult for the IIMs to go and create new questions every day.
Given so much of trouble my guess is that IIMs will not never ever change the way in which the exams will be conducted and will try the time tested menthod of bringing variations in the pattern to seperate the chaff from hay.
So gentlemen, stop worrying about online / offline CAT and start preparing.

Know your customers!

The essence of running a good business lies in empathizing with the customer and understanding his pain or pleasure points. Different people have different requirements and so you need to know your customers well enough. Sometime it pains me to see insolent businesses who treat their customers like shit. These businesses deserve to go bankrupt if they cannot give the respect the customers situation. On the other hand it is a delight to see when businesses actually take care of the situation the customers are in and make amends to their ways in order to ease the customers' pain.

I believe that it doesn't take a lot to draw this point on your customer that your business cares.

A recent example is the way in which two of India's biggest private bank ICICI and HDFC have created online interface. The above image is the virtual keyboard of HDFC bank online account.

The image posted below is typical of ICICIs virtual keyboard.And mind you, this keyboard configuration keeps changing everytime you login. Being a customer of both these banks I was trying to figure out one day why do these immecable banks have different approaches towards somethings as simple as a virtual key board.
The virtual keyboard of HDFC is the standard qwerty keyboard which rings the familiarity of the normal keboard except that you use a mouse to punch alphabets. On the hand ICICI has the dynamic keyboard where the keys move from one place to another every time you login. So why so much of a difference over something that has become so mundane. I guess someone at ICICI did a through study of user habits before arriving at keyboard structure.

Most of the users of online accounts check their accounts from office or cafe where you have a reliable internet connection. But both of these places have the problem of pests who keep staring at your screen making you uncomfortable at times.

The virtual keyboard made the sites more secure towards password threats through the internet, but at the same times it makes the user vulnerable to people who are around him, who don't feel the moral obligation to let others have their privacy. You will find suspicious colleagues in office who would like to have a glance at your screen and peeping toms in cybercafes openly staring who will not stop staring unless you ask them to.
Aakhir aankhein to bhagwan ne di hai. Hum to sirf dekh rahe the.
Now I don't think people at HDFC would have thought of such kind of inconvenience to the customer. But it was a stroke of genius that hit ICICI which came up with such an idea. It goes to show why ICICI is No. 1 and HDFC No. 2. I am sure it would'nt have taken ICICI anymore money than HDFC to develop that interface, but even in those simple matters ICICI took the lead. It goes to show that you just need to let your customers know that they are the king. And they surely will reciprocate.