Whosoever said that it wasn’t easy to bell the CAT was probably, well, confused. The exam is supposedly easy. What makes it tough to crack is the competition. Three lakh graduates and professionals vying for around 2000 seats and the competition is tougher than the much touted IIT-JEE. Needless to say engineering grads are starting to have a fetish for MBA regardless of four years of their undergrad studies which would then become redundant.
The rumor has it that this time the selection committee is on a mission to cut down on the number of engineers in the campuses and bring in more diversity. This will be done by giving more weight age to academic performance at the secondary level and also to working professionals. So it all comes down to uncertainty and chaos with even high percentile holders not receiving calls from popular IIMs.
Being an engineer we would all agree that this is unfair. The qualifying examination itself not holding enough importance for selection would demoralize and bring down people to curse their not so illustrative past. At a secondary level no student can foresee his/her ultimate career goal except the very few who give in to the IIT frenzy early. Therefore it is imperative that those results can hardly be the criterion for deciding the level of intellect or sincerity of a student. Quite so it may happen that an inferior syllabus or a bad school may put a certain student at a disadvantage than his city friends. It is only at the undergraduate level that students find a level playing ground amongst thousands hailing from different regions of the country. It is at this time that the student is on a linear graph to his ultimate aim. Point made.
And there I am the mouthpiece for millions of engineering graduates in India. But engineering itself demands a strong background in the basic sciences, an advantage no CAT aspirant can deny. And this is required because the core nature of studies is technical. No person with a clear aim of pursuing business administration would go through four years of rigorous spirals of never ending exams and projects just for the heck of it. My point is if someone is that interested in MBA then why not just get a Bachelor’s in Business and then go for an MBA. Why waste four years of national resources and laboratory expenditure to trash it all later on? The degree may fill your coffers for your next two generations, but if money was the sole reward of education then maybe we wouldn’t be a nation of so many scientists and such great achievements.
The above squeaks will hardly be audible in front of the mighty CAT that makes a lot of noise and lures away thousands of talented brains every year into jobs that serve as euthanasia for the four long years of unadulterated knowledge that was imparted to them sitting in one of the best institutions of the nation and displacing a potential scientist who could have helped make up for the dwindling number of Indians pursuing pure sciences as a career. So it all boils down to one clear story. Give science a chance.