CAT 2010 Results 'Leak' leaves students in a tizzy

by Pritika Ghura

Was the official website for CAT result hacked? Or was it just a test being done by the Indian Institute of Management-Lucknow? All these and many more questions were boggling the mind of the aspirants since Monday. Some of the aspirants, who have taken this CAT exam, claimed that they had seen their result on the CAT official website on Monday, much before the official result declaration date 12th January, 2010.
While, rumours of CAT 2010 result being spread all over the country since Monday, the IIM-L team which is handling the official website said that they were just testing the portal. News of the official result website being hacked shocked aspirants and also caused panic among them.
As the rumour spread all over, the IIMs, and the online testing company, the US-based Prometric Service Limited which has conducted the test for the IIMs, were flooded with queries about the data leakage and hacking of the website.
One students said over this issue that he too checked the site, but he had seen some result on the website on Monday morning , but the result were of CAT-2009.
"We heard about some students learning of their CAT results on Monday but when we logged on ourselves, we got to see the 2009 results," the student said. "Later, we found out that this might have happened because of irrelevant data being uploaded to test the website."
The team clarified that the portal was not hacked. Some tests were being done before the actual uploading of the result data on 12th January, 2010. Prof Himanshu Rai of IIM-Lucknow, who is the overall in-charge of CAT-2010, said, "The official results website does not possess any information that can lead to a leakage of the results. The official website- www.catiim.in - is down as we are testing it with data in preparation for the uploading of the results on January 12." Rai also added, "It has not been hacked." He said that the results will be out as scheduled but till then the website might occasionally go off the internet because of test runs with dummy data.