Prometric,the agency that conducted the computer-based Common Admission Test (CAT) 2009,confirmed on Monday that it was a virus attack that crippled 13 per cent of the 637 centres over the first three days of the exam. Few sites in some locations were affected by a virus attack from November 28-30,2009. CAT could be held smoothly over the next eight days, said Managing Director of Prometric India,Soumitra Roy. However,Prometric officials refused to share details of the virus that attacked the systems. They also did not answer how the systems,which were handed over to their team and cleaned in advance,could be infected by a virus on the first day of the test. We had run mock tests from a test facility in Delhi for almost a month,and had conducted demo tests close to the first test day. We had even tested the systems the night before, said Prometric Chief Operating Officer Charles Kernan. Roy,along with Kernan and Prometric Vice President of Solution Services David A Meissner,insisted that the problems were not caused by a flaw in their software. If if was the software,the problems would have been similar across the board,which it was not, said Kernan. At a press meet,Prometric officials were grilled on the role of NIIT Limited in conducting CAT. NIIT is our delivery partner, was all COO Kernan was willing to say,adding that his company took the responsibility for the fiasco. On the other hand,Roy confirmed that Prometric had not signed the contract with individual institutes that doubled as test centres. NIIT signed those contracts and were in charge of maintenance of the centres, he said. Since Prometric has already claimed that its software was not at fault,this would mean that NIIT could eventually be held responsible by Prometric for the failures that cropped up in CAT 2009. Prateek Chatterjee,head of NIIT Limiteds Corporate Communications,refused comment on the matter,citing a non-disclosure agreement with Prometric. This is the last of a list of non-disclosure agreements mentioned with respect to CAT 2009. Prometric has already cited a non-disclosure agreement in its contract with the IIMs,and candidates taking the test were asked to sign such an agreement before the test. The IIMs have reportedly been at the receiving end of Right To Information applications on the issue. We have already published details of our evaluation process. RTI queries do not come to us directly. We will respond to them as an when they are forwarded to us, said Roy.
