CAT 2015 Dominated by Engineers

Latest data presented by the CAT test organiser, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad shows that this year too students who holds an engineering degree managed to get the top postisions.

17 students who got 100 percentile out of 1.8 lack students holds an engineering degree.

This year changes were made to allow or help students from different stream to come out at the top but even this time the engineers got the top position.

"Many students with an engineering background are bent on pursuing an engineering-MBA combination and prepare accordingly. People from other backgrounds don't always take the CAT equally seriously. Also, a lot of the best students from streams such as physics, chemistry and English don't even opt for CAT," said Bandyopadhyay, who is CAT convenor. "Otherwise, motivated students from other streams can fare just as well." This year the classrooms of IIMs will have some nice changes as the number of women appearing for the test rising 13.8% to 58,270 in 2015. In comparison, the number of male test-takers increased by only 4%.

The 17 students who got 100% has one women out of them. Last year, too, there was only one woman in the group of toppers - a BITS Pilani chemical engineering student from New Delhi - among the 16 who topped the test.

Overall, 1,814 students scored over 99 percentile while the number of students who got above 95 percentile is 9,003. There are 136 women in the first category and 1,243 in the second. Eight women have scored more than 99.9 percentile.

CAT toppers are usually with the future of entrepreneurship but nowadays, they have been lured by multinational companies. Chirag Jha, the topper have already landed jobs with Ola and Hindustan Unilever BSE -0.86 %, respectively, but say they will take a call depending on which IIM they get through to. IIM Ahmedabad is the preferred choice, though Bangalore and Calcutta are equally coveted.

In fact, deferred admissions, a policy introduced by IIM-Ahmedabad that involves offering guaranteed seats to fresher’s who agree to get work experience, is an option that toppers with jobs in hand like Jha could opt for. Shounak Chakraborty, a final year electronics student at IIT-Kharagpur, for instance, has already landed a job as an analyst at Capital One and says he would opt for the deferred admissions option if he manages to get through to IIM-A. "Otherwise, I would like to continue with my job," said Chakraborty, whose mother is a mathematics teacher and father, a manager with the Airports Authority of India.

This year, around 2.18 lakh students had registered for CAT. This included 41 transgenders, none of whom scored above 90 percentile.