Indore : The Common Admission Test (CAT)-2015, a gateway to the IIMs and over 100 non-IIM institutions, was different in many ways. While most of new and different features of CAT-2015 are known pre and post-exam, a new feature added to the CAT this year which largely went unnoticed.
As per a report published by MBAuniverse website, the CAT for this first time witnessed participation from the third gender, “the transgender”.
As per the website, transgender candidates made their maiden presence in the CAT this year. Out of total 80 registered transgender candidates for CAT 2015, 41 appeared in the exam on November 29 in both the sessions.
This is a significant achievement of IIM Ahmedabad while conducting CAT 2015. So far transgender candidates have never appeared in CAT exam. This is the first time after the Supreme Court has recognized and awarded the third gender candidature to be named as ‘Transgender’ that 80 candidates from this category had registered for CAT 2015.
Not only this, while issuing the admit cards for CAT 2015, IIM Ahmedabad addressed all the candidates as ‘She’ instead of making it ‘he/she’. For example instruction 4 in Admit Card for CAT 2015 read “Candidate will be disqualified from CAT 2015, if she attempts to appear for the test more than once.” Similarly instruction nos. 8 & 10 also addressed the candidates as ‘her’. This was not an inadvertent mistake but was knowingly made as in CAT 2015 transgender has also been included as per the Supreme Court order. CAT centre 2015 therefore addressed all the candidates as ‘She’ in the admit card.
Later on, the CAT 2015 website also published in public domain ‘All gender specific terms used in the Admit Card are gender neutral’ implying no gender discrimination has been made in the Admit card instructions.
A total of 2,18,664 candidates had registered for CAT 2015 and out of them 1,79,602 candidates appeared in the exam on November 29 across the country marking the CAT 2015 as the most successful exam during last 6 years.
CAT 2015 attendance shows an increase of 9000 candidates as against CAT 2014 which had 1.70 lakh candidates taking the exam out of 1.97 lakh registered. So far there has been trend that around 10 to 15 percent of the registered candidates skip the prestigious and largest MBA/PGDM entrance test every year.
With total number of absentees of around 39,000 in CAT 2015 this fact is proved again. The percentage of non CAT test takers was about 14% in 2014 and 11% in 2012 and 2013.
