Every year lakhs of aspirants attempt the Common Admission Test (CAT), of which a significant percentage of top-scorers mostly come from the engineering stream.
However, CAT 2017 has emerged to be different for many reasons. Out of 1,99,632 candidates this year, there were 20 who scored a perfect 100 percentile, and amongst them, three are from a non-engineering background and two are female candidates.
This came in stark contrast to last year’s results when all the 20 who scored 100-percentiles were men and engineers. Since the last five years, it has been observed that the top scorers usually come from similar educational backgrounds.
Breaking that streak is the rising tide of aspirants, which includes women candidates and more contenders from fields other than engineering.
Plus, a marginal increase in the number of women applicants has been observed this year, which is quite encouraging because most management classrooms are more often than not heavily skewed with male students.
This apart, the management institutes are also doing their bit to encourage diversity in classrooms and are broadening the selection criteria such that more aspirants attempt the exam.
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“If you look at the selection criteria, we have been trying to promote diversity, and this, in turn, has been encouraging more women and students from various backgrounds to sit for the CAT,” said Neeraj Dwivedi, convenor, CAT 2017 and admissions chairperson at IIM Lucknow to The Economic Times.
A gateway to the prestigious IIMs, the CAT score is also taken into consideration by other premier league B-schools in the country like Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Management Development Institute (MDI), National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), and Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS).