It was conducted at 23 centres across the country and there were around 21,000 CAT applicants from Mumbai. “The results are along expected lines. We expect 1,000 of our students to qualify for the next round for admission to IIMs,” said Gautam Puri, vice chairperson of Career Launcher. Last year too, approximately 3,500 students could clear CAT. Besides the IIMs, 111 business schools in India will use the CAT 2007 scores for admissions.

“Taking last year’s results into consideration, I believe a person getting 98.5 per cent can expect to get a call from at least one of the IIMs. The cut offs may be less than last year,” said A R K S Srinivas, Mumbai director, Triumphant Institute of Management Education.

Based on the percentile score of the written examination, the various institutes prepare their selection lists. Usually the IIMs call candidates three to four times the number of seats available.

The broad pattern of CAT was similar to last year’s and while 2006 was more about ambiguities, there were hardly any surprises in CAT 2007. Vinod Raghavan, who got 96.7 per cent, said: “I had expected a little more. I have applied to only the IIMs and I haven’t received a call from any of them till now.”

Further for many students, Quantitative Aptitude (QA) was toughest of all the three sections, the others being Data Interpretation (DI) and verbal/English Usage. “It looks like students may not have done very well in QA and verbal,” added Bhattacharyya.

The final selection is based on the performance at all three levels — written exam, personal interview and group discussion (GD). However, the weightage given to the CAT scores are different in each IIM. “For instance, IIM Calcutta gives 40 per cent weightage to CAT scores, 44 per cent to personal interview, 10 per cent to group discussion and six per cent to work experience, while IIM Bangalore gives only 20 per cent weightage to CAT,” explained Bhattacharyya.

While the results were available on the CAT website (www.catiim.in), this year the website gives not just the marks but also informs students if they have qualified for any of the IIMs. Meanwhile, though the results were declared at 3 pm, a number of students were unable to get their results because they could not access the website. “I still do not know how much I have scored,” said Sumit Bansal.