Ever heard of Early bird? Now face the EARLY CAT..!!

Rumour has it that CAT will be held from 27th October to 17th November this year. This is a good 2-3 weeks earlier than the usual third Sunday of November. Notification will be out on 30th August and I expect a mad rush for booking slots towards the end of the window, i.e. near 17th November (I intend on joining the mob on this one :D ). While one week or ten days may not make or break 23+ years of aptitude building and 1+ year of assiduous preparation, there are other factors to be considered while choosing the slot.

• CAT 2009 was marred with technical glitches especially in the opening few days of the test taking window. Although I have full confidence that such a thing will not be repeated, why take a chance?
• Once the examination season starts, I prefer it to be continuous rather than discrete. If one goes for an early slot, there would be a month gap between CAT and the next scheduled exam (read IIFT) on 28th November. While this may suit some people and give them more preparation time, I would definitely prefer to complete the entire season in a single adrenaline rush rather than short bursts (Let’s say I’m a momentum driven guy).

One interesting thing is that the IIMs have doubled the test taking window from 10 to 20 days. This will have a huge impact on the overall difficulty level of the question paper. The difficulty level of the paper is expected to come down a notch because it is extremely difficult to prepare around 60 tests on a difficult pattern (around 3000 difficult questions which is a gargantuan task indeed). Something for the underdogs like me to cheer about. This is my personal view, and of some experts from some leading coaching institutes but heck, with Prometric coming up with normalization techniques and all (and keeping them under wraps, even from the RTI), who knows?

Other management institutes like IIFT have come out with their forms. The last updated status of some Examinations I have goes like this (not all are confirmed dates):

CAT : October 27th – November 17th
IIFT : November 28th
SNAP : 19th December
FMS : 5th December
XAT : 2nd January 2011

Time to buckle up the seat belt and press the accelerator.