Officials revealed that, around 5000 aspirants took the test across the country. While no major mishaps were reported, the test started late in three centres in the Delhi-NCR region- two in Delhi and one in Faridabad.
A candidate from the morning session at Asia Pacific Institute of Management, Saritha Vihar said "The exam started almost 40-45 minutes late and in a few cases there were computer log-in issues. But once the test started, there was no more problems."
Also, most of the centres in Delhi NCR has noted that there were no enthusiastic turnout with the Noida centre registering just 10 candidates in morning session and 9 in the second session. This is a very poor report against a total capacity of 140 candidates. The experts feel that this (lack of students) is normal as candidates stay away in the initial stage. The test will anyhow be conducted over 21 days.
Around 21000 out of a total 2.14 lakh candidates are from Delhi-NCR who will take the test in 10 centres. According to professor SSS Kumar of IIM, Kozhikode, who is the CAT 2012 convener, 10% of the candidates are from NCR Region. There has been no untoward incident reported so far from any centres".
Kumar said "Paper has no 'surprise' at all. Last year we made some changes after serious considerations and we want to see how things evolve. We can't be fickle with changes and we are now trying to consolidate.
Most of the candidates found that the section on quantitative ability were tough as questions were time consuming. According to the director of MBA Guru and IIM-Kolkata alumnus - Deekshant Sahrawat said "According to my students, most of these questions were time consuming. The focus on algebra in this section has been higher as well. In the data interpretation portion in the first section, one of the three sets has been relatively tough, which was same with the logical reasoning in the second."
"In the second section, the reading comprehension part had three passages of 10 questions (3+3+4) and most were not direct questions in one of the set. Verbal ability has a mix of four to five types of questions. There were 10 questions and the difficulty level was not high. There were no surprises and overall difficulty level has been moderate", he added.
Anyhow, that was the status of the first day. Hoping for the other 20 days to as the same 'barrier-free' examination. For more updates keep visiting.