CAT exam score fraudster in CBI custody after 3 years-more expected to be involved; modus operandi out

The 4 culprits who are suspected to have tempered and escalated the CAT 2012 scores for 80 candidates include the mastermind Vikas Bansal who has been arrested by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) from Ghaziabad almost after 3 years of declaration of CAT result. Other arrested accused in the case are Muhammad Aslam, Zegam Abbas and Muhammad Aafaque. CBI expects more to be involved in the CAT score goof and after producing recently arrested Vikas Bansal in the court, is exploring the possibility of involvement of more such criminal heads.

IIM Kozhikode that convened CAT 2012 with the then testing partner agency Prometric, appointed one Lucknow based firm Web Weavers to upload the scores of the candidates on site after receiving the data base. To accomplish the task, Afaque was appointed as a full timer at IIM Kozhikode to facilitate the task of uploading the data. Afaque remained at IIM K almost after beginning of CAT 2012 and chose to manipulate the scores of 80 candidates on the CAT site. A huge amount of money is suspected to have been transacted for the job.

MBAUniverse.com highlighted the issue and spread awareness about this fact immediately after the fact came to light http://www.mbauniverse.com/mba-syllabus-papers/article/id/6981/IIMs-goof... http://www.mbauniverse.com/article/id/6982/CAT-goof-up-B-schools-reaction

The foul play came to light after declaration of CAT result on January 13, 2013 when IIM Kozhikode got an email dated June 6, 2013 from an unknown person and an alert from MHRD. After comparing the database provided by the testing agency Prometric and the one uploaded by Web Weavers, Dr SSS Kumar, convener of CAT-2012 and faculty at IIM-K lodged a complaint to Kunnamangalam police station stating that Web Weavers manipulated the scores of 80 candidates, while uploading CAT scores on the official website.

During the process of investigation, except Vikas Bansal other 3 were nabbed earlier. Vikas, the key accused in the case is proprietor of Ghaziabad-based consultancy firm Career Guardian with Afaque closely associated to it. It is contemplated that in the score tempering business of CAT 2012 Career Guardian has extracted more than Rs.8 crores from the candidates.

PGDM Schools bore the brunt IIMs after revelation of the fraudulent manipulation in CAT score, claimed that they were using data base provided by the testing agency and not the one uploaded on website after manipulation. But there was no such relief to PGDM Schools and they had no option but to rely upon the scores available on website. Things went right when the corrected scores were made available to these B-schools also.

Modus Operandi The actual conduct and evaluation of CAT 2012 was entrusted to M/s. Prometric. As per the practice in the previous years, the test results were published on the web site www.catiim.in which was managed and hosted by Web Weavers. Career Guardian is an education and career consultancy firm whose agents collected money from the students to get them a seat in top B-schools. The firm got the opportunity to get its appointed agent Muhammad Aafaque, the data entry operator to upload CAT scores on website. He escalated the CAT scores of the 80 students from Career Guardian after receiving the original database while uploading it on CAT website. On behalf of Career Guardian Abbas collected money from the prospective students to increase their scores.

According to Prof SSS Kumar, convener CAT 2012 We compared the offline database provided by Aafaque to the original database from Prometric and noticed that the CAT scores of 80 examinees as per the offline database provided to us by Afaque were higher than their respective scores in the original database. This discrepancy in the scores uploaded on CAT web site was revealed when Dr Kumar received an email with details of modus operandi of Web Weavers. Accordingly a police complaint was filed and the case was later assigned to CBI as it is suspected that a wider network than the expectation might be behind all this fraud.

Vikas Bansal has been sent to 4 days CBI custody by the Kochi Court. It is expected that more layers will be taken off the case by CBI in next few days.

CAT 2013 result had to face court case on score normalization issue. However, later on Honble High Court of Indore dismissed the CAT 2013 case on scoring issue and upheld the scoring process in the exam. CAT 2014 went without any such issue and it is also expected that with IIM Ahmedabad convening CAT 2015 in partnership with testing agency TCS on November 29, 2015 at 650 testing venues across the country would also not have any such problem.

The Common Admission Test (CAT) 2015 is an entrance test conducted for selecting candidates to join the 19 t IIMs across the country. CAT 2015 scores will also be used by many top B-schools like FMS Delhi, SPJIMR, MDI Gurgaon, NITIE, IMI, IMT, TAPMI, BIMTECH, FORE among others as their first stage of short-listing and overall admission process.