Results for the Common Management Admission Test (CMAT) held in September 2012 will be declared around 12 am tonight, but we already know that with a total of 330 out of 400, Aniruddh Batra from Delhi has topped the test. Ratul Banerjee from Chennai has secured rank 2 and Gopal Bawal from Mumbai is at rank 3. The lowest marks scored stand at -36 and the average marks are 116, SS Mantha, chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) confirmed to PaGaLGuY.

Mumbai saw the highest registration numbers at 11,000 and highest number of students who attempted the exam at 9,000. However, the highest scorers are from Karnataka, followed by Chennai and then Gurgaon. Out of the 48,000 students who attempted the exam, as many as 30% were girls. Reserved category students constituted around 30% of the candidates, Mantha said.

Questioned about the findings of the expert committee formed by AICTE to probe into the alleged wrong questions in the test, the chairman said that some four to five questions had been declared wrong. “Each question carries four marks. If a candidate has attempted one of these wrong questions, we will calculate his total marks out of 396 instead of 400. Finally, we will scale the total marks up to out of 400,” he told PaGaLGuY.

Since candidates can now attempt CMAT twice every year, the comparison between the scores achieved by candidates who attempt the paper in both September and January will be done on the basis of total marks and not their ranks.

On the CMAT website http://www.aicte-cmat.in/, a link to the ‘AICTE approved institutions using CMAT scores is displayed. This list also features b-schools like Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon and Xaviers Labour Resource Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, which are not considering CMAT scores for this years admission process. Questioned about this anomaly, Mantha initially said, “A list of all colleges accepting CMAT scores is yet to be put up on the site,” adding that the present list was only a compiled list of AICTE-approved b-schools.

However, faced with the confusion created by the hyperlink text and the actual contents of the list, Mantha said, “According to the Supreme Court decision, CMAT is one of five entrance exams that the 300-odd PGDM institutes mentioned in the list can consider for admissions. For the rest 3,500 MBA colleges, CMAT is a mandatory test.”