IIM-A to tighten CAT results disclosure process

With the leakage of the Common Admissions Test (CAT) results a day ahead of schedule on Tuesday, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, (IIM-A) stated that the test run of CAT results will be done in a "secure environment" in the future.

IIM-A, to begin with, will use a different link that will lead students to the CAT results. This, IIM-A officials said, will negate any attempts by persons to access the results before they are actually declared.

The institute is planning to introduce new links to check the results on the institute's website and the name of the link would be only made available on the formal day of the announcement of the CAT results.

Meanwhile, Allwin Agnel, who runs the website pagalguy.com, clarified the website's stand in the controversy in a written statement on Wednesday.

"This, we believe, is not a 'leak' as the link was available in the open and there wasn't any explicit notice on the site barring outsiders from accessing that page. The only link we had pointed to IIM-A's servers and they later removed the page and it may well have been a test web page," the statement said.

"We will pay attention that the online testing before posting the results on the institute's website is carried out in a secured manner to prevent any further leakage. From the next academic session we are planning to introduce unique links to our website address each year for viewing the results, which would be only available on the date of the formal announcement of results," said Bakul Dholakia, director, IIM-A.

Coming out from the initial crisis and being successful to avoid hounding media last evening till this morning, Dholakia called a media conference here on Wednesday morning. With the increasing number of CAT aspirants every year, the institute is planning to make the admission procedure more transparent.

The institute started sending details of CAT scores personally two years back. Even the institute have allowed the students carry with them the test booklet since the last two years.

For the last two years the institute has been posting results on its website, but on Monday while conducting test trial of results at around 6 pm the results weblink of the institute was leaked as a portal pagalguy.com established link with the institute portal and kept the results posted for over 24 hours till Tuesday evening.

"Nobody can access the results of 1.37 lakh candidates as to view the results one needs to feed the aspirants date of birth and test registration number, which are only available with the aspirants," said Dholakia.

When asked about the results been hacked by another portal, B H Jajoo, professor at IIM-A, said, "Hacking is not the correct word to be used, but we will be more than happy if our website is hacked as it will provide a lot of academic information to the hacker."

However, the results are now formally available on the institute's website since Tuesday midnight and the institute will be despatching personalised score cards to the CAT aspirants on Wednesday.