As part of the Student Exchange Programme (SEP), 53 students of the premier Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM-L) will head to partner universities in foreign countries.

IIM-L runs one of the biggest student exchange programme (SEP) in the country and has alliances with prestigious institutions spread across 4 continents and 22 universities. This year, IIM-L will also play host to 30 foreign students. While, the IIM-L students would be leaving for their respected universities this month, the foreign students have already begun arriving on campus.

Some partner institutes include ESCP-EAP, France; McMaster University, Canada; ESSEC, France; EBS, Germany; HHL, Germany; REIMS, France; CBS, Denmark; UCL, Belgium; Bocconi, Italy; and ESADE, Spain. IIM-L Student Exchange Cell president Shailendra Singh said the international student exchange was at the forefront of the efforts towards international exposure and recognition.

With a modest beginning in 2001, the Student Exchange Programme at IIM-L has grown over the years. Its SEP has been ranked amongst the best in India according to the latest B-school surveys. “Our students will act as brand ambassadors of IIM and India abroad. The international exposure will broaden their understanding of various issues related to management and help them handle ambiguity better in future,” he noted.

The previous batches of outgoing students had won accolades like ‘Best International Student Award’ in HHL Germany. While these associations bring about exposure to different teaching methodologies for the students, they entail a cross-cultural exchange in an increasingly globalised world.

Nikhil Grover, a Marketing & Systems student, heading to EM Strasbourg, France, said the SEP offered tremendous exposure to students, who wanted maximum from their degree, and gave a feel of what the education system offer at a global stage.

Source: www.business-standard.com

Common Admission Test (CAT) 2010 will be administered across 33 cities from 27 October through 24 November 2010. CAT is a mandatory test for admission to the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and 150 other B-schools across the country.

IIMs and Prometric in a media statement announced that vouchers for CAT 2010 will be available for sale at selected Axis Bank branches from 30 August through 27 September 2010. Registration and scheduling will open on 30 August and close on 30 September 2010.

In addition to this, Prometric said it will also release a collection of short videos, which will be made available online to familiarise candidates with the registration and scheduling process, test day procedures and other aspects of CAT 2010. In order to ensure candidates are appropriately prepared, a separate video will be developed to explain the scoring method.

“Prometric is committed to providing appropriate resources to ensure that each candidate can register for the CAT, confident in the knowledge of how the test will be administered and evaluated,” said Soumitra Roy, Managing Director, Prometric India. “We encourage all candidates to review these materials as they prepare for the exam,” Roy added.

Videos will be available on the CAT website www.catiim.in for candidates to review after 30 August 2010.

Source: www.business-standard.com

This looks like the beginnings of one-upmanship contest in computer-based exam awesomeness. While the CAT grapples with getting the basics write, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies’ (NMIMS) entrance exam NMAT is offering a choice of three attempts to aspiring candidates.

The best score of the three attempts will be considered. Besides giving the candidates more than one chance of attempt, the NMAT this year will also not penalize candidates for attempting a question incorrectly. There will be no negative marking in NMAT.

But as they say, there’s nothing like a free lunch. Trying to improve one’s score in NMAT will cost additional money. Though each candidate can appear for the test three times in his own name, each attempt will be as good as registering themselves again for the test. For each attempt the candidate will need to make a payment of the full registration fee. The institute is still to declare the registration fee for this year’s NMAT, although last year this registration fee was Rs 1,650.

NMAT was turned into a computer-based entrance test last year and went by without any major untoward incidents. The test score is considered for shortlisting students for the admission processes of MBA Core, MBA – Capital markets, MBA – Banking, MBA – Actuarial Science, MBA – Pharmaceutical Management, MBA – HR, PGDM and EPGDBM programs at NMIMS. The online registration for NMAT will begin from September 8.

“The test will be conducted over three months, starting October 2010,” said professor Anupam Rastogi, the Dean of Admissions at NMIMS.

When asked how did the institute come to decide giving the candidates three attempts, professor Rastogi said, “The whole idea of introducing the three attempts is to give the candidates a chance to improve their score. If a candidate takes the test in the very first week itself, he would receive his result for that in four to five weeks. Once the candidate has his scores in hand, he can decide where to use that score or take a second attempt at the test and improve the score. One could take a third attempt too, if the candidate is not happy with his score even the second time. A candidate can take the re-attempts on consecutive days if he or she wants to. All this would have to be done within the three-month testing window.”

Speaking further about removing negative marking from the test, professor Rastogi said, “It is a much debated thing in the academic community internationally if a candidate should be penalized for incorrectly attempting a question. But we have decided to take negative marking away and let the candidates take informed guesses.” The format of the test will remain the same as before with 120 multiple choice questions equally divided among the Quant, Verbal and Logical reasoning sections.

The computer-based NMAT will be conducted by Pearson Vue again at 18 centres all over the country (Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Patna and Raipur).

NMAT has also aborted its honeymoon with taking the test international. Last year, the test was delivered in Australia, UK and a dozen Asian countries at already established Pearson Vue centers. According to the NMIMS Dean, there weren’t enough test-takers at foreign locations to justify the operational costs incurred. Hence this year, NMAT will be delivered only in India. Candidates looking to apply from abroad could use the GMAT score, professor Rastogi added.

“We believe that in today’s times, the NMAT in its new format should empower the student to give his best performance for admission to our institution” Dr. Rajan Saxena, NMIMS VC Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) Mumbai has made some major announcement regarding NMAT 2011, the entrance exam for the MBA institute which will start from October 2010. NMAT, which went computer based since last year, has decided to give three chances to the test takers. So the candidate can attempt thrice for NMAT 2011.

Talking about the development, NMIMS mentions, “The test will be conducted in a time frame of three months starting from October 2010, allowing choice of two Retakes to the students, with the best of three scores being considered for admissions to MBA Core, MBA-Capital market, MBA-Banking, MBA-Acturial Science, MBA-Pharmaceutical Management, MBA-HR, PGDM and EPGDBM programs at NMIMS.” The online registration for NMAT 2011 will start from Wednesday, September 8, 2010.

Talking about the new format of NMAT, Dr Rajan Saxena, Vice Chancellor, NMIMS says, “This year, we are graduating to the next level of computer-based testing, which will provide convenience to the students not only in terms of selection of the date for the NMAT, but will also help them to improve upon their performance and hence improve their chances of success in NMIMS MBA programs. We believe that in today’s times, the NMAT in its new format should empower the student to give his best performance for admission to our institution.”

NMAT 2011 will be held in 18 centers in India at the cities of Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Patna and Raipur. The test will be administered by Pearson VUE, the testing company that had administered NMAT 2010 as well.

NMAT 2010 was held in a 10 day window starting from Saturday January 30, 2010 to Monday, February 8, 2010. The test was taken by approximately 40,000 candidates. The duration of NMAT is two hours and has three sections, Quantitative Ability, Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning.

Prometric, the US-based testing company organising the computer-based Common Admission Test (CAT) has finally cleared the air on how it would bring uniformity in the difficulty levels of various sets of question papers. Since CAT became an online test from 2009, the test is being held over a number of days and it requires different sets of question papers on the same subject. This triggered questions as to how Prometric was equating the scores.

With a month left for the next CAT exam, Prometric has come up with an explanation. The first step is to calculate the raw score.

The raw score is derived by giving three points  for each correct answer and subtracting one point for each incorrect answer. This helps ensure that candidates are rewarded for what they know and not for random guessing.

The second step is where the difficulty factor of various question sets is taken into account.

“If two candidates take different versions of the paper and get the same number of answers correct, it would not be fair to consider them equally capable unless we could prove that each form was equally challenging. So, the second step of the process involves equating the forms,” said a Prometric spokesperson.

The spokesperson said, “A small number of questions are present in more than one version of the paper. These questions allow us to measure how candidates taking different forms compare against each other when asked the same question. By using enough of these questions across all forms, we can adjust each candidate’s raw score and provide each candidate with the scores they would have earned had each candidate taken the exact same form, at the same time.”

The process is completed by placing the equated scores on a common scale. Scaling creates a range of scores, which can be used to create a percentile rank for the test as a whole, and for each section. Candidates scoring in the top percentile performed at the highest level.

Prometric will release some online videos to familiarise candidates with the process.

Source: www.hindustantimes.com