The already longer-than-ever time window to register for the Common Admissions Test (CAT) 2011 has been further extended from September 28 to October 4, 2011. The CAT vouchers too would be on sale for four more days at Axis Bank branches until October 1.

Everything else remains the same.

The extension has been made to accommodate candidates interested in applying to the Faculty of Management Studies and the Indian Institutes of Technology b-schools which dropped their own admission tests to join the CAT bandwagon, says the CAT testing agency Prometric.

“The news about FMS and IITs joining the CAT needs sufficient time to percolate down to the applicant community and we don’t want anyone to miss out because of a passed deadline. Hence we decided to extend the date,” CAT 2011 Convenor Prof Janakiraman Moorthy told PaGaLGuY.

The original timeline for buying and registering CAT 2011 vouchers was August 17 to September 28, 2011.

Students have been filling up the CAT online registration forms with a lot of erroneous information, Prof Moorthy added.

“Last year about 200 applicants had filled only single digit marks under the school and college marks head. If somebody had scored 93.0, they had entered only 9.0. We had to call each of them individually to tally the mistake only to find that they had made a typing error while entering the marks,” he explained. Applicants were also entering misspelled names, he added.

Additionally in 2010, several applicants had missed out on IIM interview calls by forgetting to check the boxes against the IIM programs they wished to apply to.

“I advise all the CAT applicants to take paper print-outs of the completely filled forms and verify whether they have entered all the details correctly. I am stressing on a printout because one tends to overlook errors when checking on-screen,” he said. If any mistakes are discovered, applicants can make corrections in the online application until October 4.

One should not pass up an opportunity due to incorrectly entered data, he added.