Over 250,000  students take the prestigious CAT exam every year in India . The test was conducted using pencil and paper.  Indian Institutes of Management, a network of India’s top business schools in India which conducts CAT had a  $40 million deal to computerize IIM’s Common Admission Test. This deal was bagged by none other than Prometric.

For $40 million , Prometric has done a very lousy job.  When students went in to take the exam on 28 Nov, the servers crashed. And not all of the 250,000 students were taking the test. It was only 20% of them.

The students who took the online Common Admission Test, some of them were not quite convinced about the new format of the examination. And their fears had come true.

Well 50,000 stduents concurrently taking test should not be a rocket science . Compare to ebay , Amazon and twitter which handle multiples of traffic every minute. Looks like prometric did not even bothered to conduct a pilot run.

No update on when the service will be restored and if IIM can afford to have this kind of glitch again.