The six-week window to buy vouchers and register online for the Common Admissions Test (CAT) 2011 opened today. Compared to previous years, the queues at Axis Bank branches were considerably shorter and the atmosphere less anxious, at least here in Mumbai.

Simply put, here’s what you need to do to get started,

1. First check if you are eligible to appear for the test here. You need to have scored at least 50% in your undergraduate college (or 45% if you belong to the reserved SC or ST category) to begin with.

2. Buy a CAT 2011 voucher from one of the Axis Bank branches listed here. It’ll leave you poorer by Rs 1,600 (Rs 800 for the reserved categories). Detailed instructions.

3. Register yourself on the CAT 2011 website – www.catiim.in – using the unique voucher number printed on the voucher.

Repetition is supposed to be the best mode of learning. Not for Prometric+IIMs, though. Despite it being the third year of running the online registration process for the CAT, the interface as a couple of silly mistakes that could end up being a source of frustration for you.

After you enter your Voucher Number on the registration screen, you’ll be taken to a webpage asking for your name, address, telephone number and other personal information. There are two landmines here. First the milder one.

They have mistakenly labelled the STD code as Country code, as the example would show. The CAT helpline too confirms that this error exists. So when you reach this stage, enter your STD code here.

Prometric officially clarifies: Maybe a misunderstanding with Candidate Care here but candidates should enter the country code (ie 91 for India) under the Country Code field. And if they are entering a mobile number, the entire mobile number should go in the primary/secondary phone number field. And if they are entering a landline number, the entire number including the STD (ie 11 for Delhi) should go in the primary/secondary phone number field.

Hence if any of you have entered the STD code under the Country code field, please change it back to the Country code and enter the STD code in the longer textbox along with the phone number.

The second landmine is the headache-inducing one. If your address is a long one, as it often tends to be in India, you will most likely get the following error after submitting personal information.

We entered our address repeatedly into the system at the PaGaLGuY HQ, using the usual tricks such as eliminating special characters, but to no avail. The above error persisted. Left with no alternatives, we called the CAT Helpline (1 800 103 7383) and the following is what we were told by the attendant,

“Please limit each address line within 30 characters.”

An instruction not provided anywhere that is clearly visible, not even in the registration guide PDF. So while filling up the Address fields, please do not exceed 30 characters per line.

But by the time we hung up the CAT Helpline to resume registering, the landmine blew up in our faces.

Uh oh.

And we had to start all over again, filling up the personal information from the beginning. Pretty frustrating if you ask me, considering that the least a technology company ought to do is design elementary web interfaces properly. Many more people are facing this problem.

Prometric officially clarifies: the address fields are the same as last year and this never came up as an issue. There are 3 lines of addresses, for some reason candidates this year have decided to fill in their entire address in 1 line.

I don’t agree with this justification. In our own case, ‘228 Champaklal Industrial Estate’ is the standard first line of address and is clearly not the entire address. Just to be sure, I counted the number of characters in the standard first lines of the last two residences I have stayed in and both exceeded 30 characters. It is more likely that candidates faced this problem last year too but Prometric did not notice it because nobody reported it.

The rest of the interface is largely without any bugs, at least not ones we could identify. After you complete the registration, the Admit Card should be in your email Inboxes in about an hour’s time.

Do list down any other gotchas in the registration process with the solutions if you’ve found one, so that others can have an easy sailing.

The CAT registration shall remain open until September 28, 2011.