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.

Common Admission Test also know as CAT,  is the main admission decider used in the selection process for the Indian Institutes of Management, a network of India’s top business schools in Ahmedabad, Bang­alore, Calcutta, Indore, Kozhikode, Lucknow and Shillong. Of the 250,000 students who take the exam each year, just over 1,500 are admitted, making it one of the most competitive admission exams in the world.

Baltimore-based Prometric, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Educational Testing Service, focuses on technology-enabled testing and assessment services with test development, test delivery and data management services. The company delivers and administers more than 7 million tests a year for 450 clients in industries such as education, health care, government and information technology. It offers online testing or use of a network of more than 10,000 test centers in 163 countries.

To handle the CAT deal, Prometric will use its 185 employees in India and add resources, including test development and support staff, in India, according to the company. Prometric began doing business in India in 1997 and has worked with companies in the country such as Microsoft Inc., Oracle Corp., the Project Management Institute and Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Prometric had been in the middle of a strong stretch of growth, with five years of 7-8 percent growth annually. The company was purchased by Educational Testing Service in 2007. Brannick expects continued growth in 2009. This year, the company is also increasing investments in test center security and Web-based services and operations.